Contents

Fonword 10 lite l.ives Edition 1:X

:XIV

Introduction xv

I. The Paradise Garden, 19[5-[920

2. The Education of a Brahmin, 1l)20-1932 14

3. Christmas Zen, 1932-193H 42

4. The Towers of Manhattan, [93H-194[ 72

5· Colored Christian, 1941- 1947 9[

6. Correspondence, 1947-1950 [10

7. A Priest Inhibited, [950-[95[ 125

H.The Wisdom of Insecurity, [95[-[960 13[

9· Counterculture, 1960-196H 155

10. The Home Behind Home, 1969-1973 186

,""011'.1 2 17

BookshI'A/all flims 227

indc: 229

About Patlis 236

Foreword

Alan Watts rose to prominence in the 1<)60sand early seventiesas one of the key figures in that cultural wave that included the hip-pie movement, "flower power," psychedelics, rock music, and acral throwing off of the shackles of convention-all elements of aphenomenon that came to be known as the "counterculture."Though many aspects of this movement may now seem quaintlynaive to us, there was a vision to it-one of a life simpler and morehumanly attractive than one characterized by consumer greed.Along with it there came a new respect for the religions traditionsof Asia, and these Eastern philosophies began to make inroads intothe certainties of the West.The new ways of think-ing also contributed to the civil rights and anti-war movements.The traditionally Protestant societies of America and England weretaken over by a brief bohemianism, which brought a sense of joyand fun, of play, that never entirely went away again. The movementalso laid the foundations for ecological concern, something which,fortv years later, has fostered a worldwide dialogue on the subject.

The enduring influence of the counterculture is nowheremore evident today than in the "normalization" of Eastern rc-ligion: the seeds planted by Watts and others in the I<)60s havegrown to the point where today Eastern religions are consideredmainstream-in the past decade the practice of Buddhism aloneamong Westerners has more than doubled by most estimations-and their continuing presence in our culture has altered the waywe think about the religious traditions of the West.

In the fifteen years since this book's original publication, thelegacy of the counterculture has increased rather than diminished.Thus, this new edition of Zcu Effectscomes at a time when it ismore important than ever to examine the lives of the people who,like Alan Watts, are counted as the movement's movers and shak-ers. These leaders were a mixed bag of academics and singers; poetsand painters; Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian teachers; adepts ofZen. Watts, arguably the most influential among them, was anEnglishman who had literally "gone West," eventually finding hishome in California, after sojourns in N ew York and Chicago.Classically educated at a British private school, a follower of

FOrC111()rd

Buddhism in his teens, for a time an Episcopalian cleq,ryman, hegradually abandoned the more conventional aspects of Westernlife along with Western dress, which he regarded as constricting. In195I Watts moved to San Francisco where he helped set up theAmerican Academy of Asian Studies, to meet the growing interestin all things Asian. The school quickly acquired some remarkablepupils, including the poet Gary Snyder, a whole group of impor-tant artists, and the people who later went on to found the EsalenInstitute, the center and retreat dedicated to the exploration ofhuman potential. Watts' intention was less an academic one than itwas a wish to bring about a transformation of consciousness in hispupils. He certainly succeeded in bringing some extraordinarypeople together, many of whom became friends for life.

Like almost everyone caught up in the vision of transtor-mation. Watts experimented with psychedelics. Unimpressed atfirst, he became fascinated at the timeless vision of the world theyshowed him. In the early days,Watts, like others, did not guess howdestructive drugs could become. Watts, however, always saw themas a temporary aid to consciousness, a cleansing of perceptionwhich, like psychotherapy, you gave up when they had taught youwhat they could: "When you've got the message, hang up thephone," he would say.

By 19()9Watts had become an icon of the movement to theextent that his celebrity made life sometimes difficult. Onewoman described to me how, at this period, dining with Watts ina restaurant in San Francisco, she was embarrassed by a disciplewho came in and knelt before him, disregarding a roomful ofonlookers. Perhaps we understand more nowadays about that sortof fame-s-the sort where people have an awed need to touch, orat least to stare.

Watts' philosophy, caretullv developed over the years withstudy, had a freshness and honesty about it. He had read deeply inChristian theology and felt that many of its symbols had lost theirpower as a result of being taken too literally, and needed to berediscovered. He worked at meditation, read Jungian psychology,studied Oriental religious ideas of all kinds, visited Japan. Out ofmuch thinking, reading, and talking, he developed a language thatspoke to Westerners who wanted a religion, or at any rate a way of

x

life, that was not totallv trapped in rationalitv He felt that rclicionI •

tended to suffer from mystification and the use of a mandarinlanguage that excluded most people, except as timid followers ofleaders who then abused their power. His own teaching movedbetween ways of talking about huge irnpondcrablcs-c-suflering,death-e-re the evervdav v-rhe kind of food, clothes, relationships,ways of living that might be appropriate for human beings.

Few, ifany, human beings can cope well with becoming a guruor icon. Alan Watts handled it better than some, mainly because hehad good friends, and he had a sense of humor that put his fameinto perspective, but he was stressed by the exposure and at timeshis head was turned by it. Watts is not a man on whom it is possi-ble to deliver an easy verdict-s-he escapes labels. He had anextraordinary wisdom, a lot of knowledge, and a rare ability to putboth into language that ordinary people can understand. He stillhas much to teach anyone searching to find belief-s-his short anddeceptively simple little books are remarkable guides. He wassometimes vain, a know-it-all who could be thoughtless of others,but he was invariablv kind in what he said about other people. "Hewas fond of lifting the elbow," Dom Aelred Graham wrote to me,"but I never heard him say a harsh word about anybody." There arenot many of us of whom the Kecording Angel will be able to sayas much, and it was perhaps Watts' capacity to live out the life hewanted, with all its ups and downs, its failures and successes, thatleft him so attractively free of envy. His children, I noticed when Iinterviewed them, were both clear-sighted and truthful about him,but also had loving memories, as had his friends.

He was both an inspired leader and, like all of LIS, flawcdv-inGary Snyder's words, "he sowed problems wherever he went"Watts knew himself quite well, and used to describe himself as a"genuine f:lke," an expression that catches not only his ambigui-ties, but also the ambiguities of the human condition, not leastwhen we are trying to be religious. This book tries to explore boththe genuineness and the takcrv,

A[ollira FurlonoLondonJanuary 2001

XI

Acknowledgments

My principle thanks go to Joan Watts Tabernik of Bolinas, Cali-fornia, Alan Watts's daughter and executor, who encouraged meto write the book and was full of useful information. I was alsomost grateful to Ann Andrews who talked with me at great lengthabout her father and the family history, and showed me muchpersonal kindness. Mrs. Mary Jane Watts was very generous withher time.Other members of the Watts family who helped with time,

memories, photographs, tapes, and diaries were Mark Watts, JoyBuchan, Leslie and Peggy Watts, Sybil Jordeson, and Jean Mc-Dermid. Mrs. Dorothy Watts wrote to me at length about AlanWatts.Watts had many close and loving friends; those I talked with

about him were Elsa Gidlow, Roger Somers, Gary Snyder, GordonOnslow-Ford, Toni Lilly, June Singer, Robert Shapiro, Ruth Cos-tello, Sandy Jacobs, Virginia Denison, and Watts's niece by mar-riage, Kathleen.Others who gave information were Bishop John Robinson,

XIV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Theodore Roszak, R. D. Laing, members of the San Francisco ZenCenter, Episcopal clergy who remembered Watts from his Chris-tian days, and Joanne Kyger. Dam Aelred Graham correspondedwith me about the trip he and Watts made to Japan, Felix Greeneabout broadcasting with Watts, and Patrick Leigh Fermor aboutbeing at King's School, Canterbury.King's School, Canterbury, provided archive material, suggested

contacts, and described to me what the school must have been likein Watts's day.John Snelling of the Buddhist Society of Great Britain gave me

good advice, and the Society produced some interesting photo-graphs.For much of the research on the book I was away from home,

and on my various visits to the West Coast of the United StatesI much appreciated the hospitality of Ann Andrews, AndrewWeaver, Daniel McLoughlin, and Ruth Costello. Frank and MaryLee McClain of Winnetka, Illinois, gave me a temporary homewhile I researched Watts's years in Evanston and suggested anumber of local sources of help. As on so many visits to the UnitedStates, the principal sources of help, encouragement, and hospital-ity were Fred and Susan Shriver of Chelsea Square, New York.

Introduction

When I began to write about Alan Watts I paid VISItSto theVallejo, to Druid Heights, and to the lonely stupa on the hillsidebehind Green Gulch Farm. In that last place, wanting to paytribute to a fellow Englishman so far from home, I picked a fewof the California poppies that grew in the grass and laid themin front of the little grave.Watts puzzled me, then and later. The combination of spiritual

insight and naughtiness, of wisdom and childishness, of joyoushigh spirits and loneliness, seemed incongruous. Wasn't "knowl-edge" in the Buddhist sense of overcoming avidya, or ignorance,supposed gradually to lead you into some sort of release fromcraving, and yet there was Watts drinking and fornicating all overCalifornia? On the other hand Jesus had said that those who livedin "the Way" would have life and have it more abundantly thanothers, and everything I knew about Watts gave me to think thathe had abundant life of a kind that made most of the good peopleseem moribund. He brought others to it, as well. Many morepuzzled or troubled than he were introduced by Watts to a

XVI INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION XVll

new way of seeing themselves and the world, and sometimes to amuch more rigorous regime of spiritual exercises than he wouldhave dreamed of undertaking himself, by way of zazen (Zenmeditation) and Buddhism in its various manifestations.Another thing that puzzled me about Watts was that he seemed

terribly familiar to me. Among clergy in the Christian churchesand gurus I had met in other forms of religion, some of them,often less remarkable than Watts, had almost all his characteristics.Though so splendidly and individually himself, Watts was at thesame time a type, a type that nobody talked about much in thechurches or in other religious communities because representativesof the type were something of an embarrassment, they were veryoften the subject of scandal. Certain sorts of disgrace tended tofollow them, yet of the ones I had known well, there often seemedto be a special sort of grace as well, as if they were people whohelped to break up rigid social patterns, forcing us to ask questionsabout them. We seemed to need them.I had read of shamans who performed a function of this kind,

but it was not until I met Gary Snyder and he told me aboutCoyote, the "trickster" hero of the Shoshone and the CalifornianIndians, that I could take the idea a bit further. Coyote, a favoritehero in Shoshone stories, was a bit of a rogue, but he knew some-thing important, something other people needed. He was the onewho brought fire to the earth by stealing it - it was owned andtreasured by a group of flies. In the process of bringing it to histribe he caught his tail alight and nearly burned himself to death;this was one of a long list of catastrophes that made up his life.He was also the one who brought death to mankind, accidentally.In the process he inadvertently made life worth living, but whenhis own child died and he really began to understand what deathmeant, he tried to reverse the process. Too late.

Coyote is a great folk hero, but is contradictory in nature, be-cause his approach to issues of good and evil is an ambiguous one.When he performed "good" actions, they had a way of turningout wrong. When he was "bad," and he was often bad, goodnessseemed in some mysterious way to emerge. He resisted thecategories beloved of moral majorities; what had appeared com-fortingly simple until he came along was thrown into comical con-fusion. "I think the most interesting psychological thing about thetrickster," says Snyder, "was that there wasn't a clear dualism ofgood and evil established there, that he clearly manifested benevo-lence, compassion, help to human beings, sometimes, and had acertain dignity; and on other occasions he was the silliest utmostfool."Maybe it is in this contradictory way that Watts is best seen.In a poem called "Through the Smoke Hole," Snyder tells the

Indian story of "the world above this one." This world is a wig-wam with a hole in the roof through which the smoke of the firegoes. There is a ladder that goes out through the roof, and throughthis hole the great heroes climb on their shining way to the worldabove. It is our good fortune, however, that a few make the jour-ney in reverse, tumbling, backside first, through the hole, to rejoinus in this world and give us hints of what they know. Such a onewas Coyote. And so, possibly, was Alan Watts.

One

TheParadiseGarden1915 -1920

ALAN WATTS was born at twenty minutes past six in the morn-ing on January 6, 1915, at Chislehurst in Kent, England, the childof Emily Mary (nee Buchan) and Laurence Wilson Watts. Emilywas thirty-nine years old and had begun to despair that she wouldhave a child.Emily came from a big family of five boys and two girls. She

was the fifth child, followed by her favorite brother William(Willy) and another girl, Gertrude. Her father, William, was apatriarchal figure who ran a haberdashery and umbrella businessin London. Sternly Evangelical, he prayed with his staff eachmorning before the shop opened, and was so unwilling to dismissemployees when times were bad that his business itself finallyfoundered. Alan, who could not remember him, pictured him asa sort of wrathful Jehovah who filled his mother with guilt andProtestant inhibition without giving her any real feeling for thespirit of religion.An equally important figure to the Buchan children was their

father's sister, Eleanor, an elegant, wealthy lady who lived at

2 ZEN EFFECTS The ParadiseGarden 3

Bakewell in Derbyshire and who worked in subtle ways to under-mine William's austere regime. "I hope Eleanor is saved," herbrother used to observe doubtfully. Eleanor took a particular in-terest in the girls, having them to stay and generally encouragingthem. As a result of her enthusiasm and her financial help, bothEmily and her sister Gertrude were able to carve out careers forthemselves. While Gertrude trained as a nurse at the LondonHospital, Emily trained as a teacher. She taught physical educa-tion and domestic economy at a school for missionaries' daughters,Walthamstow Hall, at Sevenoaks in Kent, but her real talentwas for needlework. She was remarkably gifted at embroidery-there are examples of her work still to be found with a fine senseof color and design - and she became a teacher and designer forthe Royal School of Needlework, where some of her designs arestill used.Emily was not a pretty girl, she had a brusque way of telling

people exactly what she was thinking - a relative remembers thatif she didn't like your hat she would tell you so straightaway-and she had a keen intelligence that she never bothered to hide.None of this made her particularly marriageable by the standardsof the period, but in 19 I I she met Alan's father, Laurence WilsonWatts, and they fell in love.Laurence was four years younger than Emily. He was the

second of five boys and was educated at the Stationers' School(a school originally for poor boys, financed by the Stationers'Guild. In Laurence's day quite well-to-do families sent their sonsthere). Since his father had a good job with a big silversmithingfirm, Laurence grew up in comfortable circumstances at StroudGreen in North London. Perhaps a less dominant personalitythan Emily, he was a gentle, tolerant, humorous man, well likedby those who knew him. He is remembered in the Warts and

Buchan families as "a ladies' man like all the Watts men." Atthe time he met Emily, he was working for the Michelin TyreCompany at a job that took him on regular trips to Europe.Perhaps Laurence liked taking care of Emily, or perhaps she

brought to the relationship some sort of forcefulness that helacked. Whatever the cause, they remained a most loving anddevoted couple for the rest of their lives. Their marriage in Sep-tember 1912 started off on a good note when they found a verypretty cottage in which to set up house at Chislehurst in Kent.Still a rather attractive suburb of London, Chislehurst had acresof unspoiled common land, a village of old world shops, a fine oldchurch (Saint Nicholas's), and a village pond. Three HolbrookCottages, as their house was then called, was tiny, with the charm-ing air of a doll's house, and it was surrounded by a largeand beautiful garden. Emily and Laurence could not have beenmore pleased with it. They planted a mountain ash or rowantree in the front garden and called their new home RowanCottage.From the time of their wedding they seemed to be happy, as

Emily's letters to her brother Willy in the United States makeclear. "Laurie is so good to me. He always comes down and lightsthe fire for me in the morning, then brings up a tray with tea andwe have it in bed. It is nice and warm by the time I go down tomake porridge. He thoroughly enjoys our real Scotch brand ofporridge. Laurie is quite a Buchanish man and does all sorts ofthings to help me."1Their financial prospects seemed quite rosy to them as well.

Laurie was earning £250 a year, plus some money his firm keptback to invest for him. In another two years he would get £300 ayear, with an eventual prospect of £400 or £500.Despite the happiness the new marriage brought, child-bearing

4 ZEN EFFECTS The Paradise Garden 5did not come easily for Emily. She had conceived immediatelyafter marriage and on June 19, 1913, Emily gave birth to a babyboy, Brian, who lived for only two weeks. She herself was veryill and took a long time to recover; she worried desperately aboutLaurie and about who would care for him during her stay in thehospital. This tragic sequence, though common enough in thosedays,must have made Emily wonder whether she would be able tobear a child, since she was now nearly thirty-eight. By Christmasshe was thinking of consulting a specialist, presumably about hergynecological difficulties.In 1914 Emily had a miscarriage, but finally in January 1915

Alan was born. Emily's sister Gertrude was present to assist atthe birth and to look after Emily. (Gertrude was to be an im-portant member of the family for much of Alan's childhood-"a pretty, vivacious tomboy,"? as he remembered her.) Thoughdelighted to have a baby at last, Emily did not find motherhoodeasy. A relative of Emily's remembers seeing her once with aneighbor's baby and noticed that she seemed to have no idea ofhow to hold it or what to do with it. She found it charming, butseemed to have no natural feeling for babies, and its mother wasglad to take it back.Natural mother or not, Emily longed for a daughter, and in

1919 she gave birth to another child, a boy, who lived only afew days. The Buchan women tended, tragically, to lose theirbabies after birth; not until the next generation was this knownto be due to the rhesus (Rh) factor. Many of the Buchan womenhad Rh negative blood, which meant that a baby born to themwith Rh positive blood was endangered and needed an im-mediate blood transfusion. Alan's blood group may have beenRh negative, which would have enabled him to survive.Emily was not, in any case, burdened with the physical care

of Alan, for she hired a trained child nurse to look after him.One of Alan's Watts cousins, Leslie, once shared his nurseryfor a few days, and Leslie's mother told him later how shockedshe was when she realized the nannie's severity, particularly withAlan: "Wouldn't let a child have a biscuit, or a cuddly toy in bed.Wouldn't let Alan have his toys much at all."Emily herself was a loving woman, but she had an austere

puritanical streak and believed in "firmness"; Alan was not to beindulged.Nonetheless, Alan had some good memories of his early child-

hood, especially of the cottage and surrounding garden where hewas free to play. He remembered the hedge of sweetbriar in thefront garden and "an arbor of jasmine and a magnificent tree ofgreen cooking-apples upon which we used to hang coconuts, slicedopen for the delectation of wrens and blue tits." He loved thehours spent in the garden, getting lost in a forest of tomatoes,raspberries, and beans on sticks stretching far above his head, see-ing himself surrounded by "glowing, luscious jewels, embodi-ments of emerald or amber or carnelian light, usually best eatenraw and straight off the plant when you are alone." There was ablissful time when part of the garden was allowed to go fallow"with grasses, sorrel and flowering weeds so well above my headthat I could get lost in this sunny herbaceous forest with butter-flies floating above.?" For the rest of his life Alan rememberedthe taste of the peas, potatoes, scarlet runner beans and pippinapples that came out of that garden.Beside the garden was a piece of land that the Wattses owned

and behind that the playing fields of a girls' school, Farrington's.Beyond that was an immense estate of fields and forests. On theboundary between the school and the Wattses' land was an enor-mous sycamore tree, ninety feet high, which was important to

6 ZEN EFFECTS The Paradise Garden 7

Alan in later memory, as he describes. There "the sun rose, and. . . in the late afternoon my mother and I watched glisteningpigeons against black storm clouds. That was the axle-tree of theworld, Yggdrasil, blessing and sheltering the successive orchards,vegetable gardens and (once) a rabbit farm which my fathercultivated in times of economic disrress.:"From all accounts, Alan was a precocious little boy. When he

was three Emily described him in a letter to her brother Willyand his wife as "a gay little chap and an adorer of trains. Neverstill and always talking. He has a splendid imagination and is notshort of words - and makes up a good many for himself - veryexpressive they are too. He can say the whole of the Lord's Prayerby himself. You would both be rather pleased with the bairn.?"Alan was aware from an early age of the love his parents had

for each other - he remembered their holding hands under thedining room table - and of the total acceptance and love hereceived from his father. He had an early memory of playingwith a piece of dry excrement as he lay in his crib. "What haveyou got there?" his father asked him, with the perfect courtesy of aVictorian gentleman. Alan handed it to him, he examined it care-fully, and politely handed it back.Laurence, in fact, never seemed to get over a kind of reverent

wonder at this tiny child in their midst, and his proud astonish-ment at his son's achievements must have done wonders forAlan's self-confidence. Writing, in old age, a preface for his son'sautobiography, Laurence tried to say a bit about what his experi-ence as a father had been:

What may appear to be ... odd ... is that a person of Alan'sbreadth of outlook and depth of thought should have sprung fromthe parentage of a father who inherited much of the Victorian out-look and tradition and a mother whose family were Fundamentalists

to whom the Bible was the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothingbut the Truth .... As a child a gift of narrative showed in himbefore he could read or write, and an early need was to keep himsupplied with material for illustrating the tales he invented....Plenty of white kitchen paper, pencils, and coloured chalks hadalways to beon hand."

Alan's drawings, writings, and sayings were cherished to adegree unusual in a period less interested in "expression" inchildren than our own. As soon as he could talk he composed aninterminable serial (complete with illustrations) that he dictatedto Gertrude about an imaginary country called Bath Bian Street.The Wattses were extraordinarily lucky in that the First World

War seemed to affect them very little. Laurence was saved fromconscription by a carbuncle on his neck, though he used to drillwith a Territorial unit on Chislehurst Common. (The unit marchedto the sound of drums and bugles produced by a group that Alancalled "Daddy's band.") Night air raids usually resulted in theunexpected pleasure of cocoa in the dining room for Alan. Andonce when a bomb did fall in the middle of the village green noone was hurt.Even without the intermittent excitement of the war, the social

and domestic life of Chislehurst was interesting to a little boy. Themilkman arrived amid clanging cans with his horse and cart. Nextdoor lived Miss Augusta Pearce, "Miss Gussy," Alan called her.On Sundays church bells rang across the Common, and Alan wouldgo to Christchurch with his mother, or, if Emily was ill, to theAnglo-Catholic delights of Saint Nicholas's with Miss Gussy. OnSundays, too, uncles and cousins sometimes came to visit - to beborn into the Watts/Buchan families was to be part of an im-mense, devoted clan that frequently met and consumed enormousmeals together.

8 ZEN EFFECTS The Paradise Garden 9

Shopping expeditions to the village brought their own joy withvisits to the sweet shop run by a Miss Rabbit, the bakery run byMiss Battle, the stationery shop and the grocer's smelling of "freshcoffee, smoked meats and Stilton cheese." There was a chemist'sshop called Prebble and Bone, which displayed enormous glassjars of colored water in the window, and a dress and drapery shoprun by the Misses Scriven, which gave Alan terrible nightmares.The sisters "displayed their dresses upon 'dummies,' headless, arm-less and legless mock-ups of female torsos, having lathe-turnederections of dark wood in place of heads.... In the midst of anotherwise interesting dream there would suddenly appear a calico-covered dummy, formidably breasted (without cleft) and sinisterlyheadless. This thing would mutter at me and suggest ineffable

"7terrors ....As with any small child, however, the life that mattered most

was at home, with father and mother, and with the routines ofeveryday life. Looking back on his childhood from his fifties, Alandivided the house in two: upstairs and downstairs. Upstairs seemedfilled with nameless longings, fears, desires, dreams, and night-mares, as well as with boredom, pain, shame, and humiliation.Downstairs was interesting, fun, sociable, the heart of culinary andaesthetic joy. Upstairs was his bedroom, which, as a small child, heshared with his nannie, and which looked across vegetable small-holdings and trees to the spire of Saint Nicholas's Church. He wassent there continually, it seemed to him, for interminable siestas,for bedtimes while the sky was still light, and for punishment.He disliked the bedroom so much that for the rest of his life henever slept in a bedroom if he could help it, preferring some kindof bed that unfolded or unrolled in the sitting room.Worse than the bedroom was the unheated bathroom, which

he associated with all the humiliations of constipation. Emily andher nannie attended to Alan's bowels with Protestant thoroughness.

"They seemed to want, above all things, to know 'Have you been?'They invaded the bathroom with an almost religious enthusiasmto discover whether you had made it. They insisted that you 'go'every morning immediately after breakfast, whether or not youfelt so inclined.?" Failure to "go" resulted in a dose of CalifornianSyrup of Figs, followed by senna pods, cascara sagrada, and in thelast resort, castor oil.Apart from the miseries of constipation, the bathroom was the

place where Alan got spanked by his mother "seated on the crap-ulatory throne," was told Bible stories by his nannie, and wastaught prayers by his mother. The first prayer he was taught was"Gentle Jesus, Shepherd, Hear Me":

Gentle Jesus,Shepherd,hear me:Blessthy little lamb tonight.Through the darknessbe thou near me;Keep me safe till morning light.Letmy sins be all forgiven;Blessthe friends I love sowell.Take me when I die, to heaven,Happy there with thee to dwell.

Doubtless intended to comfort little children at nighttime, thisprayer had the effect on Alan of making him feel frightened ofthe darkness and worried that death was an imminent possibility.He had heard of people "who died in their sleep," and thoughtthat this misfortune might happen to him. (Revealingly he mis-pronounced the fifth line as "Let my sins be awful given.") Laterfor Watts the Christian religion would seem to be as bleak as thisbathroom, a desert without beauty, where an impossible cleanli-ness seemed to be the sine qua non of godliness, where it wasalways Judgment Day, and where there seemed no appropriateattitude but that of shame.Fortunately there was also the "downstairs" life of the Watts

10 ZEN EFFECTS The Paradise Garden II

household, a life as rich and interesting as the upstairs life wasdrab and depressing. Emily taught the little boy to feed the birdsand to imitate birdcalls (years later in California he was to teachmockingbirds to sing like nightingales), and as soon as he wasold enough, his father took him on bug- and moth-hunting expe-ditions. They would catch the moths by putting a treacly prepara-tion on the trunks of trees. It is typical of Alan that, forty yearslater, he remembered exactly what the chemical mixture was thatattracted the moths. All his life he was fascinated by technicalinformation.The beautiful garden was the center of his childish world, but

one other place had an importance for him that he was too youngto understand. In the dining room there was a huge monstrositycalled "the Housetop," a combined chest of drawers, roll-top desk,and hanging cupboard. In the cupboard Emily kept plum puddingswrapped in cheesecloth, fruitcake, brandy, preserved fruits, and thefamily silver and glass. In the desk were small pigeonholes anddrawers filled with delightful things: checkbooks whose ink gaveoff a wonderful smell, pens, pencils, rulers, ivory gadgets, andplaying cards.

In the center of this bank of drawers and pigeonholes was a smallcupboard flanked by Corinthian columns with gilded capitals. Itcontained mostly photographs, postcards and old letters, but therewas a secretway of pulling out the whole unit to get accessto twohidden compartments behind the columns.... From as far backas I can remember I always had the fantasy thar, somewhere, theHousetop contained some mystery, some hidden treasure, somemagical entity, that would be a key to the secret of Iife,"

While the Housetop was mysterious for the young boy, hismother's drawing room was positively magical. The drawing room,used only on special occasions, contained Emily's collection of

Oriental treasures. There was a round brass coffee table from India,a Korean celadon vase, two Chinese vases, and some Japaneseembroidered cushions. It was not so very unusual for houses tocontain a little chinoiserie or japonerie, the odd vase or hanging,or the Indian curios brought back from the far reaches of theBritish Empire, but Emily's deep feeling for Oriental art, hertaste, her profound sense of color, and her knowledge of em-broidery transformed what might have been just a room full ofknickknacks into a place of wonder and beauty. Alan knew thatthese ornaments were his mother's choice. He recognized, later,that through her he was heir to a kingdom that might not other-wise have been his. "She turned me on, bless her, to color, toflowers, to intricate and fascinating designs, to the works of Ori-ental art."l0Yet despite all this he sensed that something was wrong in his

feelings for his mother as far back as he could remember. Hevalued her skills, her care of him, her conviction that God wasplanning great things for him when he became a man. He knewher for a good woman, honest, truthful, generous, and he knewhis own childish dependence on her. Yet he had a worrying senseof disappointment in her. She did not seem to him as pretty asother women, perhaps because she was older than the run ofmothers, and he couldn't stand the way she looked when she wokeup in the morning.Sometimes it seemed to him that his lack of positive feeling for

his mother came from the sense that she disliked her own body,and he wondered if that was because she was so frequently sickafter her marriage. "When she spoke of people being very ill shewould swallow the word as if it were a nasty lump of fat, and takeon a most serious frown."!' In fact, for the rest of Alan's child-hood, and indeed the rest of her life, Emily's health was frail. She

12 ZEN EFFECTS The ParadiseGarden

suffered recurrent hemorrhages from her lungs as a result of anattack of pleurisy from which she never seemed to make a com-plete recovery. Alan's cousins remember that the family often wenthome early from family gatherings because "Emily doesn't feelwell."Somehow underlying Emily's lack of prettiness, her illnesses,

and her dislike of her own body, Alan could sense the influence ofthe fiercely fundamentalist Protestantism her father had passed onto her. It was not so much that Emily herself had taken on rigidbeliefs - she might have been much more cheerful about it if shehad - as that she had been force-fed with them and had livedwith an uneasy and half-digested religion ever since. Intellectuallyshe was a tolerant and widely read woman; she and Laurence en-joyed exploring all sorts of religious ideas. It was the unexaminedand partly unconscious aspects of fundamentalism - in particularin connection with the body - that Alan felt he detected in her.Watts was reserved about his feelings for his mother when he

came to write his autobiography, perhaps mainly out of considera-tion for his father who was still alive and who took a keen interestin the book. But to friends in private Watts spoke of the difficultyhe had in loving her. This puzzled many of Watts's family andfriends who found her gentle,lovable, and caring. Although Wattswould not have disputed her having those qualities, he felt helacked from his mother cuddling and sensual appreciation. Whathe got instead was a dour religion that she didn't fully believe inherself, which got mixed up with condemnation of his nascentsexuality and with the rigor of Californian Syrup of Figs. Any in-fant in a Christian fundamentalist world was necessarily unsatis-factory, unacceptable, guilty, and ashamed, an example of thefallen and unredeemed human state. For Watts sexuality becamesomething surreptitious, associated with beating or other sado-

masochistic fantasies, or with dirty jokes. It seems significant thatafter writing about his mother and her religion in his autobiog-raphy Watts at once moved on to a limerick mocking the Trinity,and the Holy Ghost in particular.f For most of his life Watts wasto enjoy a reputation for his impressive repertoire of funny andrisque limericks, often connected with religion.Watts's relationship with his father was less intense, but warm

and happy, giving him a level of self-confidence that Emily couldnever give. Laurence always seemed to have time to spend withhis little boy. He read aloud to him, Kipling being a favorite, sanghymns and Edwardian ballads to him, and taught him to shootwith a rifle and a bow. In many ways Alan's childhood was amaz-ingly secure, with the middle-aged couple pouring love and atten-tion on one little boy.

Two

TheEducationofaBrahmin1920-1932

ALAN'S PRECOCITY AND CLEVERNESS made him an objectof attention and amusement in the limited circle of grown-ups heknew. He was, as people used to say then, "a proper caution."Once when he was ill in bed the doctor came and proposed to givehim an injection."Only," said the dignified small child, "if you will give me two

shillings first." He got his fee.In photographs he looks a rather owlish little boy, bespectacled,

scrubbed, combed, and very neatly and smartly dressed. He knewhe was something extraordinary - Emily had made that very clearto him, as well as to all her relatives. Leslie Watts, Alan's cousin,remembers how it was simply taken for granted by everybody thatAlan was "very clever."Despite this early promise, Watts found school to be a letdown.

He went, enthusiastically enough, to the Saint Nicholas kinder-garten, just across the green from Rowan Cottage, a school forchildren up to the age of about eight. As an only child, he wasinterested in the other children, but for the most part, he was

The Education of a Brahmin

bored in the school. Emily had already taught him to read, hefound multiplication tables uninteresting, and he didn't like thesort of "prissy paintings" they did, being used to bolder artisticsorties at home. So he spent a lot of time just gazing out of thewindow at the village green.On one particularly awful day his teacher, Miss Nicholas, chose

him as the blind man in blindman's buff. He was fond of MissNicholas, mainly because she was so pretty, but groping round theroom, unable to see, chasing giggling knots of boys and girls, madehim feel as if he had been singled out for humiliation. Furious atthis indignity he went home and drew a picture of BuckinghamPalace, which he took back to school next morning. King George Vwas lying dead with an arrow in his heart, and knights in armorwith flaming eyes were saying, "How dared you do that to Alan?"Miss Nicholas cannot often have been taken to task so severely

by the children she taught, and she did not take kindly to it now.Showing the offending picture to the whole school, she gaveAlan a lecture on his failings. School, he decided, was a waste oftime.Outside of school he spent much of his time in the "Paradise

Garden" of Rowan Cottage, and there conducted elaborate funeralceremonies for dead birds, bats, and rabbits. He still believed infairies and magic. On the whole he preferred the company of girls,and in his autobiography he describes how, with "two adorablyfeminine tomboys," Margaret and Christine, he explored a localstream from end to end. He found them rather intimidating.While Watts was carrying out his funeral ceremonies, Emily

was beginning to make plans for him. In the England of thosedays, if you hoped to end in a distinguished profession, you neededto have a strictly prescribed, and very expensive, education - theeducation of a Brahmin, as Watts later called it. You abandoned

16 ZEN EFFECTS The Education of a Brahmin

the company of your little friends at the local kindergarten, junior,and secondary school, and you underwent the rigors of the privatepreparatory school, usually at age eight, followed by the publicschool at age eleven. Both were usually boarding schools, bothgave you a good grounding in Greek and Latin, both were usuallynoted for their spartan standards.Emily and Laurence did not have much money, but they lived

very modestly and were prepared to save every penny they had togive Alan a Brahmin's education. Alan was clever; Emily believedthis as an article of faith, even though his performance at kinder-garten had revealed little sign of it. Still, she knew that the wayto shine in the world was to pass through the series of ordeals andinitiations provided by private education.So, Emily enrolled Alan, aged seven and a half, at Saint Hugh's,

in Bickley, a nearby town. It was rather early to go to a prep school,but Emily felt that Alan's "real education" could not begin soonenough, and although the school was close enough for him to at-tend as a day boy, Emily, no doubt suppressing some of her ownlongings for her child's company, decided that Alan would go asa weekly boarder. She felt strongly that an only child should notbe "indulged."The boys had to wear a uniform to which Alan took an instant

dislike, finding it uncomfortable and rigid: "Tight, dark greypants, a black waistcoat or vest with lapels and cloth-covered but-tons, and a black monkey-jacket known as a bum freezer, obviouslydesigned for the purpose of making the bottoms of small boysmore readily presentable for flogging.'" There was also a large,white starched collar worn outside the jacket, and a straw boater,beribboned with school colors, in this case salmon pink with awhite fleur-de-lis at the front.Emily and Alan traveled on the bus to Saint Hugh's, Bickley.

Though proud of the importance of going to a new school, Alannevertheless broke down in panic."Please, please, let me stay at home," he begged, adding pathet-

ically that he was "too young" to go away. Emily was adamant.She said it would be good for him to have to hold his own in thehurly-burly of boarding school.Alan found himself placed in a six-bed dormitory. After he had

said goodbye to his mother, he went down to supper and foundthe food so unpalatable that he ate nothing except white bread.Going hungry to his dormitory he had a harsh introduction toSaint Hugh's. There was bullying of new boys - beating andother initiation rites. There was a new vocabulary of lavatory andsexual words. The puritan world of Rowan Cottage, in which hewas the center of his parents' existence, and where every precociousword he uttered was received with admiration, was a poor prepara-tion for this sudden descent into hell. Fear, loneliness, homesick-ness swallowed him up. How shocked Emily would have been ifshe could have read his summing up, written in middle age. "Myfirst lesson [at Saint Hugh's} given at night in a ... dormitory bythe other occupants, was in the vocabulary of scatology and sexualanatomy, with a brief introduction to buttock fetishisrn.:"The next morning the seven-year-olds assembled in the class-

room of Miss Elsie Good, "a precise and serious lady with a sharplypointed nose, who instructed us in English, French, Latin, Arith-metic, History, Geography and Holy Scripture. I suppose all thiswas, as my mother called it, 'good grounding,' but the wholeprocess was carried out under such duress that only exceptionallygifted Englishmen survived it and retained any lifelong fascinationwith arts and letters.':"History was taught with a notable slant towards the splendors

of the British Empire, and French by a system so idiosyncratic that

18 ZEN EFFECTS The Education of a Brahmin

Alan would find himself translating: "Do you have some prettyjewels? No, but I have given some water to the owls.'" Algebraremained an ominous mystery to him, and his attempts to questionits dark edicts resulted in his being struck with the blackboardpointer. Music was the most depressing lesson of all. He was anaturally musical child with, at least later in life, a fine singingvoice, but the severity of the teacher and the boredom of theCzerny studies and "children's pieces" he was obliged to play onthe piano set up a mental block that lasted for years.Life in the classroom was lived under a peculiar form of tension.

In order to avoid being ritually whipped on a Saturday morning,the boys had to get fourteen "good" marks during the week, marksarbitrarily given by any teacher who happened to be pleased witha boy. This nerve-racking system did not serve Alan well, and hewas beaten a lot. To go home briefly to Rowan Cottage after thesedreadful weeks to parents who, though loving, would not reallyhave understood his suffering even if he had known how to tellthem about it, convinced as they were that it was "good for him,"in fact only heightened the contrast between home and school.Sunday was passed in a gloom of apprehension about the comingweek. Yet he felt he was expected to be grateful for his intermin-able ordeal. "My parents knocked themselves out financially tosend me to this amazing institution.?"At least home gave him the opportunity to eat a decent meal.

Though there were a few things at Saint Hugh's he could eat andenjoy - the fried sausages, and suet pudding with Lyle's GoldenSyrup on top of it - Alan found most of the food disgusting. Aworried school informed his parents at one point that he was eatingnothing but bread.School shattered, or at least badly damaged, the strong sense of

self-esteem he had shown at Saint Nicholas's. The feeling that he

was a prince among his peers vanished. "I have been told, in lateryears, that I look like a mixture of King George VI and RexHarrison, but then the boys told me I was a cross-eyed and buck-toothed weakling.?"Apart from all the other hardships of school he missed the com-

pany of girls, hitherto his closest friends. No longer could hedream of marrying a schoolmate. Such love as existed at SaintHugh's was between older and younger boys, pretty younger boysseeking the protection of strong older boys as part of the dailybattle for survival. Alan was not regarded as "pretty."Inevitably he learned in time, however, how to make the kind

of compromises necessary to survival in such a place. He learnedto swim and eventually got into the school rugger team, thoughhe could never reconcile himself to cricket, having an ocular de-fect that prevented him from seeing the ball quickly. He enjoyedmilk chocolate bars, smutty schoolboy jokes, and the quirks of themore eccentric teachers. Like all preparatory and public schools ofthe period, Saint Hugh's put most of its energy into teaching boysthe classics.As the years passed, the terrors of school grew somewhat less,

though Alan never quite recovered from his initial shock. Thisplunge into a world of sadism and sexual innuendo left the puritanchild in him with the lingering impression of shameful excitementand prurient curiosity. Whenever he writes of this grim rite ofpassage, it is with a dryness that seems understandably defensive.The brutality of upper-class British schools, he says, is already sonotorious and has been so extensively described that he sees littlepoint in going into details. "I was sent off to boarding school forinstruction in laughing and grief, in militarism and regimentedmusic, in bibliolatry and bad ritual, in cricket, soccer and rugby, inpreliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arith-

20 ZEN EFFECTS The Education of a Brahmin 21

metic, algebra and geometry) and in subtle, but not really overt,homosexualiry.""Saint Hugh's was, like all such schools, devoutly Anglican, and

while Alan was at the school, Emily did some of her exquisiteneedlework on the altar cloths. This brought Alan into contactwith Charles Johnson, a brother of the headmaster and a giftedarchitect and designer, who carved the new reredos and generallysupervised the work. Johnson, who was known to the boys, wasregarded by them as wildly eccentric; some said he was mad, othersthat he was under the influence of drugs. One of the stories wasthat he needed a male nurse constantly in attendance, disguised asa butler-cum-chauffeur. Alan was surprised to find that he likedhim very much. Johnson, who had lived for years in Mexico, builthimself a Spanish-Mexican house in the grounds in splendid con-trast to the school's drab architecture, and this became one ofAlan's refuges from school. Johnson himself became the first of along line of older mentors, male and female, who instructed Alanin the arts of living. Like all such people, he struck Alan as"urbane" and "utterly removed from the crickety-militaristic at-mosphere of his brothers' school.'" (The school had two head-masters, the Rev. Frederick Johnson and Alfred Johnson.) Watch-ing him at work designing or carving, Alan thought that CharlesJohnson gave him more education in five minutes than his broth-ers would give him in five years, mainly through his pleasure andmeticulous care in his craft.Despite his resentment of school, Alan also admired Alfred

Johnson. Alfred had a real feeling for literature and even morefeeling for music. He had a passion for Wagner, and taught theboys to sing parts of Die Meistersinger, one of Schubert's masses,and Brahms's Requiem. Unfortunately, Alfred's enormous pleas-ure in music did little to redeem the harm that the Saint Hugh'smusic lessons had done.

But more important than either Charles or Alfred to Alan'sdevelopment was their sister Elvira and her husband, FrancisCroshaw (also widely believed around the school to be a lunatic) .Alan had found a friend at school, Ivan Croshaw, and Ivan tookhim home to a household which for some years was to be a delightto him and a powerful influence on his interests and taste. Elvirawas, in Alan's view, "handsome, witty, and sophisticated," in con-trast to his own mother, and she "spoke exquisite French," was"Continental and Parisian" in style, and was also very funny. Herson always referred to her as paM (short for Poor Old Mother),and in Watts's words, "she controlled us simply by casting an in-fluence. I never saw her punish her son, nor lose her temper ....I cannot remember any adult with whom I felt so completely atease, and she, if anyone, is responsible for my adoption of what issometimes called an un-English style of life. For me she becamethe archetypal representative of relaxed, urbane society, seasonedwith wit and fantasy.:"Francis Croshaw, who was too wealthy to work, was also a

glamorous figure. He smoked black Burmese cigars, "the kind thatare open at both ends, nubbly in texture, and burn with a blueflame and hiss," and he shared these with the eleven-year-old boys.Croshaw was given to taking off in his car. for a day and not re-appearing for a week, having suddenly taken it into his head to

have a look at Wales; he walked about in a Moorish dressinggown carrying a dog whip (though he had no dog), and he readFrench paperbacks by the score. Alan was slowly finding the sortof friends he would relish for the rest of his life.He particularly enjoyed their cosmopolitan qualities, their lack

of insular "Britishness." Even his reading at this age revealed hisdislike of narrow, jingoistic attitudes and "clean-limbed" heroes.At the age of eleven his passion, instead, was Dr. Fu Manchu. Hefancied himself as "a Chinese villain, keeping servants with knives

22 ZEN EFFECTS The Education of a Brahmin

hidden in their sleeves, who appeared and disappeared without asound.?'" He wanted a house with secret passages, with screens,with lacquer bottles of exotic poisons, with porcelain and jade andincense and sonorous gongs. He began filling his bedroom at homewith cheap Chinese and Japanese ornaments, until Emily, whohad already given him a copy of the New Testament in Chinese,took the hint and decorated his room with some fine Orientalhangings, including a Japanese kakemono of two herons watchinga flight of tumbling sparrows. The beauty, the simplicity, butabove all, the "alienness" of Oriental culture appealed to a childalready feeling alien within the culture in which he was broughtup. An affinity for all things Japanese was already growing in him;it was a secret link between him and his mother, a doorway to thesensuality he felt she had mislaid.He missed rhe presence of girls in the male world of school, but

consoled himself as best he could with his female cousins. Hisfavorite was Joy, the daughter of his mother's brother Harry, abouthis own age, and "ruddy and joyous." Joy was shy in adult com-pany, while Alan was talkative and mischievous, bur Alan wouldtalk to her and tease her until she came out of her shell, doingdrawings to make her laugh. He corresponded regularly with her,as he did with other girl cousins, very often decorating his letterswith rabbits (modeled rather obviously on Peter Rabbit). Even asa child, he had a "way with women."In the Watts/Buchan clan, family was of immense importance,

and there are many photographs of the various relatives gatheredin the garden of Rowan Cottage, or out in the countryside onweekend or holiday walks. On Sunday nights the family oftengathered at Uncle Harry and Aunt Et's house in Bromley (a localtown) for a tremendous high tea, which Alan, in his less sophis-ticated moods, thoroughly enjoyed. The evening ended less enjoy-

ably for Alan with hymns round the piano. He was later to feelthat he had been fed relentlessly with hymns for the whole of hischildhood and youth, and moralistic and maudlin as many of themseemed, they somehow never ceased to haunt him with rheir dig-nity and beauty. But the Sunday evenings were as much a state-ment of family solidarity as religious feeling, and gradually Alancould feel himself pulling away from the dowdy, if worthy, Prot-estant milieu, turning towards a world more glamorous and morecosmopolitan.He was beginning to travel a little outside the environs of

Chislehurst, and in later years the sight of Chislehurst stationstill recalled the thrill of going away, alone or on family expedi-tions. "Much as I loved my home, that station - with the knock-knock sound of tickets being issued, the tring of the bell announc-ing an approaching train, and the murmuring rails as a train camein from the distance - was a center of liberation."!'Meanwhile at home, Alan and his friend Ronnie Macfarlane

roamed the countryside around Chislehurst on bicycles, carryingan air rifle. Ronnie and he despised, on the one hand, contempo-raries who played cricket and talked in the affected accents of theupper classes. On the other hand they did not want to be identifiedwith lower-class boys who dropped their aitches, talked in a "com-mon" accent, and revealed signs of poverty and meager education.So they set themselves up as a pair of independent adventurers -the Japanese word ronin summed it up - needing nobody, butalive to the excitements and wonder of the world around them.But times were growing hard for Emily and Laurence. Laurence,

like so many in the Great Depression, had lost his job. The Wattseshad lived simply, apart from the cost of Alan's education, pleasedwith all that they had, thrifty and saving. They had a little moneysaved, which they tried to eke out with Emily's embroidery and a

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rabbit farm that Laurence set up beside the house, but there wasmuch family discussion about how they could be helped. Shouldthey emigrate to America and join Emily's brother Willy? Theywrote to ask Willy's advice. How could they keep Alan at boardingschool? Saint Hugh's, pleased perhaps to help a boy of considerableintellectual ability, agreed to reduce the fees.One burden was taken from their shoulders when, in 1928,

Watts won a scholarship to King's School, Canterbury. King'sSchool is probably the oldest school in England, with a long listof famous former pupils, including the poet Marlowe. Standingbeside Canterbury Cathedral, the school is integrated into the lifeof the cathedral, and therefore into one of the most ancient sitesof Christianity in England, the place where Saint Augustine ofCanterbury initiated the conversion of a whole people, the seatof Edward the Confessor, the heart of Anglicanism.It was a setting to which no boy with any feeling for history

or visual beauty could remain indifferent. The poet and writerPatrick Leigh Fermor, a friend and contemporary of Watts's atthe school, remembered the deep awe he felt at his surroundingswhen he first went to King's.

I couldn't get over the fact that the school had been founded at thevery beginning of Anglo-Saxon Christianity, before the sixth cen-tury was out, that is: fragments of Thor and Woden had hardlystopped smouldering in the Kentish woods: the oldest parts of thebuildings were modern by these standards, dating only from a fewdecades after the Normans landed. There was a wonderfully cob-webbed feeling about this dizzy and intoxicating antiquity - anambience both haughty and obscure which turned famous seats oflearning, founded eight hundred or a thousand years later, intogaudy mushrooms and seemed to invest these hoarier precincts,together with the wide green expanses beyond them, the huge elms,the Dark Entry, and the ruined arches and cloisters- and while I

The Education of a Brahmin

was about it, the booming and jackdaw-crowded pinnacles of thegreat Angevin cathedral itself, and the ghost of St. Thomas 11Becket and the Black Prince's bones - with an aura of nearly pre-historic rnyth.l"

Watts too was affected by these ancient surroundings. He de-scribed the Canterbury of his boyhood as

a garden enclosed- walled and gated on all sides. . . . Almostevery building was of pale grey stone, and the architecture Roman-esque and every variety of Gothic. The whole atmosphere wasstrangely light and airy, full of the sound of bells and the cries ofjackdaws floating around the great Bell Harry Tower of the Cathe-dral, and when March came in like a lion the air swept through thebuildings, slamming doors and rattling shutters, and seeming tocleanse the place of human rneanness.P

The great cathedral seemed to him romantic and heraldic, reminis-cent of the tales of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. He was movedby this central shrine of English religion, the "corona" of Canter-bury.

All around this corona are tall narrow windows of stained glass,predominantly blue - as good as anything at Chartres - which,with their colours reflecting on the pale grey stone, give the wholeplace a sense of light and lofty airiness, jewelled transparency andpeaceY

The school was, 10 many ways, in a good phase. It had anoriginal and enlightened headmaster in the person of NormanBirley, and it attracted a number of lively and able teachers as staff.It gave, as most public schools did, an excellent education in theclassics. However, it also showed an interest in the arts and gaveboys active encouragement to pursue them, which was an unusualpractice for public schools at the time.

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Sports, to Watts's dismay, inevitably figured largely in the cur-riculum as well, but even there those who were bored could escape:"In summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricker, [IJ laypeacefully beside the Srour, well upstream of the ryhthmic creak-ing and exhortation, reading Gibbon and gossiping with kindredlotus-eaters under the willow-branches.l'" In many ways it was avery civilized and cultured way of life.Watts was in Grange House, with a housemaster, Alec Mac-

donald, whom he liked and admired. Macdonald had been a pilotin the Air Force in the First World War, but, perhaps because ofthis, he was "a man of peace" as well as a man of culture. He wasa good linguist, with a deep knowledge of European classics, anda music lover who played classical records to the boys. He had alsoinvented a new method of musical notation - just the sort ofthing to fascinate Watts - and in general was much the sort ofperson Watts hoped to become.There were difficulties and tensions at King's School for Watts,

though perhaps fewer than at Saint Hugh's. Many years laterWatts was to tell his second wife Dorothy that he had mindedbeing "a scholarship boy," that this had given him feelings of in-feriority. Since his father was by now unemployed, and since evenwhen he had been employed he had worked in "trade" instead ofbeing a "gentleman," it is possible that Watts was mocked ordespised for these reasons. "Trade," in that prewar England, wasstill "not quite nice." Watts suffered, however, from a sort ofunwilling snobbery on his own part, a fascination with the easeand style that went with wealth, and it must have been painful toreturn to a home where every penny was counted, where his ad-mired father was out of work, and where his mother did what shecould to make money by embroidery.He had learned a lot at Saint Hugh's about survival, and he

The Education of a Brahmin

reflected that, whereas he had been frequently beaten there, atKing's he managed "by sheer guile and skulduggery to avoid italtogether - only to learn the curious fact that the man who usesbrains against brawn is, by the brawny, considered a sneak, acheater, and a coward - almost a criminal.":"At one point early on he attempted to run away from King's

School. He had written a Latin exercise in Gothic script with adecorated initial capital, and his teacher decided that this attemptto "be different" was a wicked prank. His running away, though,was half-hearted, mainly because he could not see an alternativeto the school. Clever non-Brahmins went to the local "countyschool" where, public school boys believed, everyone said "ain't"instead of "isn't," and he could not contemplate such a fate. But ifhe dreaded the county school, he felt that he did not really "fit in"at King's School. Instead, he acquired an armor of bravado, supe-riority, and clever criticism that he was rarely to shed during therest of his life.

During Watts's first year at Canterbury, Archbishop Cosmo Gor-don Lang was enthroned at Canterbury. The magnificent cathedralwas packed to the doors with robed bishops and clergy, with gov-ernment ministers, with royalty - the whole panoply of churchand state. The archbishop's procession wound through the naveand up the long flight of steps to the high altar with Watts, wear-ing knee breeches, silk stockings, and buckled shoes, carrying thelong red train. Already a performer and a lover of ritual, he thor-oughly enjoyed it, and Emily and Laurence were overwhelmedwith pride.At thirteen he was more at home in the elegant clothes of ritual

than in the drabber garments required for everyday life. The uni-form for boys below the rank of sixth form was, as Watts says,

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designed for "dowdy dandies," an affair of a speckled straw boater,with a blue and white ribbon, a starched wing collar with a blacktie, and a black jacket with Oxford gray trousers.The food, as at Saint Hugh's, outraged Watts's growing interest

in gastronomy: "a diet of boiled beef, boiled cabbage, boiledonions, boiled carrors, boiled potatoes, and slabs of near-stalebread."17The serious eating in such an establishment was all extra-curricular. One of the pleasures of life was to nip down to theTuck shop run by a Mrs. Benn beneath the arches of the medievalhall and to feast on barley sugar, butterscotch, toffee, marshmallow,a chocolate bar, or an ice cream soda. Before being long at theschool boys acquired their own Primus (methylated spirit) stoves,and learned to cook sausages, eggs, and bacon for themselves.Sometimes Watts brewed a sort of curry made from two onions,six frankfurters, a handful of raisins, salt and pepper, curry powder,and cooking oil. As in all such schools there was a tea shop withinbounds where coffee and scones and cake were on hand, and assoon as boys began to look even remotely grown-up they wouldcycle out into the country to drink the excellent Kentish ale atlocal pubs.In his second year at King's, Watts was prepared for confirma-

tion - it was the routine initiation into Christian practice for boysof his background, one of the common rites of puberty. The teach-ing that accompanied the rite included dark warnings againstmasturbation, homosexuality and playing around with girls.Among the dangers rhey were given to understand attended mas-turbation was syphilis. Alan dimly wondered, as no doubt they alldid, just what they were supposed to do with their nascent sexualfeelings. The answer seemed to be: "When aroused, go and dangleyour balls in cold water" - of which there was plenty.Like another schoolboy ar an English public school during the

same period - Thomas Merton - Watts was depressed by the

The Education of a Brahmin

absence of girls in school life, and by the homosexual preoccupa-tion that this lacuna seemed to impose. Officially dedicated todiscouraging homosexuality, the school tried to control it by for-bidding friendships with younger boys.Patrick Leigh Fermor, more daring than most, remembers kiss-

ing a very nice fair girl, a maid at the school called Betty. Heapproached her first in the corridor. "She looked very surprised,then went into fits of laughter and dashed off. It happened two orthree times - 'Now don't be a Silly Billy' and 'You'll get meshot!' she would say.":" There would have been a frightful row ifthey had been caught by the authorities.Later in his school career, Leigh Fermor had a more serious

heterosexual encounter. He was "very smitten," as he puts it, withNelly, a knockout beauty who was the daughter of the local green-grocer. The two of them used to sit and hold hands in the back ofher father's shop. Eventually the affair was discovered and LeighFermor was expelled from the school. He had liked the place buthad had a stormy career there largely because of an enthusiasm,adventurousness, and wild originality that the school regarded asoutrageous. "Frequent and severe beatings" made not the slightestdifference to his conduct, as he continued to live out his own cour-ageous brand of romanticism. Watts, in later life, described hisown response to the unbalanced life of school.

I would not go so far as to say, with Kenneth Rexroth, that Englishpublic schools are positively seminaries for sodomy, buggery,pederasty, and sadomasochism. But monastically separated fromgirls as we were, a good deal of this kind of thing went on, and myfirst serious love affair was with a younger boy. We did nothingabout it physicallyexcept hold hands, and as soon as I could escapefrom school I sought the company of girls, but found it strangelydifficult to consummate any relationship until the age of twenty-two.... I was afraid of rejection.P

30 ZEN EFFECTS The Education of a Brahmin

Confirmation, when ir came, was supposed to be one of the highSpots of school life. At least half expecting to be filled with theHoly Spirit, Watts renewed his baptism promises and then wentforward to kneel before the bishop. With the bishop's hands onhis head, he listened to the confirmation prayer: "Defend, 0 Lord,this thy child with thy heavenly grace, that he may continue thinefor ever; and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit, more and more,until he come unto thy everlasting kingdom." When the service wasover and he left the cathedral, he could detect no difference insidehim, no white-hot religious fervor or tendency to speak withtongues. Of course, the laying on of hands did mean that he couldnow receive the wine and the bread at Holy Communion. This tooturned out to be a disappointment, lacking in any of the feelingof convivialiry and joy that he instinctively felt ought to accom-pany it. "No sense of being turned-on, but only an intense andsolitary seriousness. Everyone in his own private box with God,apologising for having masturbated, fornicated or adulterated."20He felt that there must be some other way of approaching the deepmysteries of existence, but no other way, at least at Canterbury,seemed to be on offer.

Religion apart, life at school was getting quite interesting. He wasmaking very rapid progress through the academic curriculum. Hewas very gifted at Greek and Latin verse, and in history his teacherhad already marked him down as a candidate for an Oxford schol-arship. He had a passionate pleasure in learning that surprised hismore philistine schoolmates - he was continually looking thingsup in encyclopedias and checking on the origin of words in diction-aries, an astonishing enthusiasm in a world that cared more forsport than for learning.With Leigh Fermor he led a rich imaginative life, discussing

all kinds of ideas and interests on long bicycle rides. Leigh Fermorremembered how much he loved to laugh and what a strangeeffect the very slight cast in Watts's eye gave - "an amusingobliquiry to his glance - and you sometimes didn't know whicheye was looking at yoU."21Watts was also beginning to discover the joys of public speak-

ing, partly under the rather questionable influence of a Welshteacher, Mr. William Moses Williams. Mr. Williams would arrivelate at the school debating society, knowing nothing of the subjectfor the evening, nor on which side he was down to speak. Imme-diately he would pitch in to the side that took his fancy, speakingwith irresistible eloquence, without notes or even very muchknowledge. Watts said that he learned from Williams "that youcan pitch a good argument for any cause whatsoever." In later lifeWatts himself was a master of effortless eloquence.At the age of fourteen, casting round in his mind for a subject

for the junior debating sociery more original than the usual onesabout war, coeducation, and corporal punishment, he rememberedhis own deep pleasure in Japan. He took as his title "The Romanceof Japanese Culture." Mugging up his material for the occasion,he spoke of Zen Buddhism and Shintoism, of rhe martial arts, ofcalligraphy, and of painting. Japan was not a subject that Britishschoolboys knew much about at the period - the Japanese wouldprobably have come, like most foreigners, under the general con-demnation of being "wags" - but Watts talked so well that theircuriosiry was aroused and they asked many questions. It was per-haps the first time that he had thought seriously about Zen Bud-dhism and its rituals.Much of his life at the time was taken up with another set of

rituals - those of High Anglicanism. The Dean of Canterbury,the famous "Red" Dean, Dr. Hewlett Johnson, had a passionate

ZEN EFFECTS The Education of a Brahmin 33

enthusiasm for Anglo-Catholic practices, a meticulous sense of theway elaborate ceremonies should be carried out and processionsconducted. Watts, with his natural gifts as a performer, was afavorite server and a keen apprentice at the altar. "I have even," hereminisced, "served as master of ceremonies at a pontifical SolemnHigh Mass, celebrated from the throne .... [Hewlett Johnson}reformed the style of services in the Cathedral and, among otherthings, taught us how to process in the right way - not marchingand swaying in close order, but gently strolling, about two yardsfrom each other."22 It was a much more congenial form of Chris-tianity than Uncle Harry's hymn singing and his mother's uncom-promising Protestantism. Anglo-Catholics, he found out (withthe possible exception of the Red Dean who slept on a camp bedin the open air and ate a strange diet), tended to like the goodthings in life. One such local high churchman, Canon TrelawneyAshron-Gwatkin, was the rector of Bishopsbourne, a countryparish. Watts would bicycle out there on a Sunday, enjoy a deli-cious meal, followed by a Balkan Sobranie cigarette, and wouldadmire the fine collection of books belonging to the wealthy canonand his wife. It was a world away from the boiled cabbage ofschool.Francis Croshaw and the witty Elvira (PaM) remained Watts's

favorite grown-ups, and these two broadened his horizons immeas-urably by taking him abroad to Saint-Malo in 1928. At fourteenhe was enchanted by the delicious, unfamiliar food and wine, muchof it eaten out of doors. Forty years later he still remembered thetaste of the pate de foie gras, the ceufs en gelee with truffles, andthe intoxicating local cider. He was taken to Mont-Saint-Michel, tothe races, to a bullfight down in the Basque country, and to acasino at Biarritz. The pleasure of all these sophisticated adven-rures, and the excellent food consumed so assiduously along the

way, were like a revelation, a revelation that made what he calledthe "boiled beef" culture of England seem particularly crass. Notsurprisingly, "from then on, the curriculum, the sports, and theideals of King's School, Canterbury seemed, with some few excep-tions, to be futile, infantile and irrelevant.'?" Feeling himself nowto be a man of the world, Watts became rather more self-consciously arrogant, endlessly "one up" on his hapless fellowswith their passion for cricket and football, a self-styled "European"in the heart of British culture.The Croshaws' style, and Watts's growing interest in becoming

a man of the world, contrasted rather poignantly with life at home,where Laurence's unemployment had brought matters to a crisis.In 1928 Emily had started an embroidery business in WidmoreRoad, Bromley. Her brother Harry owned two houses there, whichhe used for furthering foreign missions, and he allowed her tohave a workroom in one of them. She took embroidery commis-sions, gave lessons in embroidery, and made small items such astea and egg cozies, which were displayed for sale in a showcaseoutside the house. The embroidery business grew, and Laurencehelped with the commercial and accounting side of it, but theystill could not make ends meet. Laurence even wrote to ask Willyin Minneapolis about the prospects of work there, but more seri-ously considered borrowing money to buy one of the houses fromHarry, letting rooms in it to pay for the mortgage and other ex-penses, and letting Rowan Cottage. In the end Harry rented theproperty in Bromley to them, and they let their beloved RowanCottage and its cherished garden on a seven-year lease. It was apainful move, one to which Watts does not refer in his autobiog-raphy. It meant that they saw more of the Bromley relatives.Uncle Harry held a religious occasion every Sunday afternoonknown as PSA, a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon, designed to offer a

34 ZEN EFFECTS The Education of a Brahmin 35

little uplift in place of more worldly occupations. He persuadedWatts to conduct one of these, which he did with enthusiasm,getting Joy to illustrate some of his points on the piano. It wasperhaps the first religious occasion he ever conducted. UltimatelyUncle Harry would be poles apart from Watts in matters of reli-gion, but he nevertheless managed to convert Watts to a lifelongpassion for one thing: tobacco. Cigars, pipes, cigarettes oftensmoked through an elegant holder - Watts was rarely withoutone or another for the rest of his life.As painful as the financial bite of the Depression was Emily's

failing health. While trying to stan a business, she was contendingwith repeated hemorrhages from the lung. "The doctor assures usthat there is nothing in the way of disease there and that all thatwas needed to effect a cure was rest so that she has spent the bestpart of the last fortnight in bed," Laurence wrote. "Alan is verywell and happy at his school in Canterbury. I went down to seehim on Friday last. While waiting for him I spent a very pleasanthour wandering round the precincts of the Cathedral, in which theSchool is situated. Afterwards we had a good walk together. He isgrowing up very fast and is a very companionable sort of boy.Both the Headmaster and his Housemaster think well of him."u

Watts's talent for Latin and Greek and his intense enjoyment ofacademic work took him into the sixth form, the top class of theschool, at the age of fifteen. Now he wore a dark blue band roundhis boater and carried a silver-topped walking cane. He became aprefect and a monitor.His passion for Chinese and Japanese art, always encouraged

by his mother's taste, was leading him deeper into questioning hisown Christian inheritance. Canon Ashton-Gwarkin's son Frank,who had worked at the British Embassy in Japan, gave Wattssome hanging scrolls and a Japanese dictionary. Francis Croshaw,

who had Buddhist inclinations himself, lent him books from hislibrary, including one by a writer unknown to him, ChristmasHumphreys.One day, wandering in Camden Town during the holidays,

Watts bought a fine brass Buddha and a book by Lafcadio Hearnentitled Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. He bought the book be-cause he was under the impression that it had a lot about ghostsin it, but what ultimately delighted him was the author's descrip-tion of his own house and garden at Marsue, so much so that manyyears later Watts went there on a pilgrimage. The poetic discourseon frogs, insects, and plants fired the boy. He felt "a certain clarity,transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art. Itseemed to float."25By reading another book by Lafcadio Hearn, Gleanings in

Buddha-Fields, he learned about the concept of nirvana. For sometime he had felt a profound distaste for public school religion andeven for the adventurous liturgical life of Canterbury Cathedral;above all, perhaps, he longed to reject the repressive fundamen-talism of his mother's family. Christianity, he considered, was allabout accusation - God the Father was, in effect, always "tellingyou off" for your wickedness. The essay on nirvana gave him a"convincingly different view of the universe" - it seemed to seeultimate reality quite differently. "The ground of it all was, in-stead, something variously known as the Universal Mind, the Tao,the Brahman, Sinnyo, alaya-vijnane, or Buddha-nature, wherewithone's own self and being is ultimately identical for always andalways.'?"Having seen this, Watts acted. Not without a certain pleasure

at the one-upmanship involved, he made it publicly known bothat school and to his astonished relatives that he had become aBuddhist. There were not many Buddhists in the Britain of the1930s, least of all among public schoolboys. (Patrick Leigh

ZEN EFFECTS The Education of a Brahmin 37

Fermor responded to Watts's startling declaration with gratifyingawe: "Do you really mean that you have renounced belief in theFather, Son and Holy Ghost?") Watts wrote off confidently tothe Buddhist Lodge in London, addressing his requests for infor-mation to Christmas Humphreys, the judge, who was the best-known English Buddhist of his generation. Noting both theaddress and the intelligence of his correspondent, Humphreys be-lieved for some time that he was writing to a master at the school.Watts's Buddhist conversion was less admired by the Watts and

Buchan families, and bent on persuading them all, Watts wrote asmall pamphlet that he circulated to them and to his school friends.Laurence, then and later, was driven to defend his son by sayingthat God was a mountain to whom many different people lookedup from many different angles, and Alan was entitled to his angle.Aunt Gertrude, on the other hand, wrote back suggesting thatBuddhism was a selfish belief, and that its attitude to sufferingwould not help those who suffered as much as a belief in a lovingJesus Christ. She also suggested that Buddhism ignored women.In a correspondence with Gertrude that allowed him to expand

upon the beliefs he had set out in the pamphlet, Watts took up thecudgels, first defending Zen intellectually: "Now I have just setforward a nice little theory which is intended to be understood bythe intellectual faculty. The Zen master aims at giving you a muchwider vision of the same Truth through the intuitional faculty, sothat you have it not as a conclusion, but as a conviction." Againsta charge Gertrude had made about meditation, Watts replied, "Ofcourse constant meditation - the constant adoption of an imper-sonal attitude to Life - is a remarkably difficult thing to keep up- I do not pretend to be able to do it for more than five minutesat a time."27Watts refuted Gertrude's claim that suffering is a "test." "I find

it impossible to believe in a personal, loving God when the world

is so full of suffering and ignorance. If you say that suffering is atest for us, I must ask, why have a test?" Man, says Watts, hasmade God in his own image:

I'm afraid it is hard to put faith in a man-made God. Then putfaith in what? In the immaculate Law of which all things atetransient manifestations. How is this done? By looking at life froma universal instead of a personal standpoint; by seeing all things asthe functioning of Reality; by annihilating the distinction between"I" and "not I," between "self" and "not self," between subject andobject, and by seeing all things in terms of Reality - as being JUStSO.28

None of this is likely to have appealed very much to a Christianof Aunt Gertrude's Evangelical stamp. The personal relationshipwith Jesus, the awareness of personal sinfulness redeemed by thesuffering of the Savior, the need for effort at overcoming personalfailings, the acceptance of suffering as God's will, the belief in atranscendent God owing nothing to anthropomorphic projections,were all very different from Watts's puzzling talk of "I" and "notI." And besides, Buddhism felt strange and uncongenial - thesort of thing foreigners would like, as did Alan in his state ofadolescent rebellion, but scarcely the sort of thing that would doin Chislehurst.At school, a less pained and a more intellectual approach was

brought to Watts's new beliefs. Watts had a new housemaster,R. S. Stanier, whom he admired so much that he copied his hand-writing for a while - a useful ploy in forging permissions forboys to stay in Canterbury out of school hours. Stanier took astrongly Calvinist line against Watts, but knew his own theologyso thoroughly and argued so well that they both enjoyed theirverbal battles. Watts claimed that "inadvertently" Stanier taughthim "all the fallacies of Western logic."Norman Birley, a liberal and intelligent headmaster, well-

ZEN EFFECTS The Education of a Brahmin 39

accustomed to the ephemeral phenomenon of adolescent fervor,seemed not at all put out by the boy's change of faith, to Watts'ssecret annoyance. In the spirit of one who believed in encouragingall things educational, he sent Watts off to represent the schoolat a weekend conference on religion. William Temple, then arch-bishop of York, presided, and in spite of his own contempt forChristianity, Watts was won over by the archbishop's good mind,his humor, and his geniality. Temple had presence, a quality helpedby his enormous belly and a laugh so loud that it made the roomshake. Smoking a pipe with the boys late at night he told them twostories that a Zen master might have told. One had to do with themusician Walford Davies. Teaching a hymn to a choir, Davieswas heard to say that they must on no account try to sing it, butshould simply think of the tune and let it sing itself. (Both Wattsand Christmas Humphreys later used this story in books to illus-trate the Zen approach.) The other story was about Temple's owndifficulties in composing Latin poetry as a boy: "I was working bycandlelight and whenever I got stuck and couldn't find the rightphrase, I would pull off a stick of wax from the side of the candleand push it back, gently, into the flame. And then the phrase would. I ,,29simp y come to me.Back at school Watts continued to develop his religious and

other interests with passionate enthusiasm. He was studyingVivekananda's Raja Yoga, a book that recommended abstainingfrom meat, alcohol, and sex, and suggested yogic exercises; despiteridicule he managed to perform yoga at night in his dormitorycubicle. Later, to his pleasure, he got the flu and was transferredto the school sanatorium. Alone in his bedroom he was free topractice all the spiritual exercises he pleased; it also gave him morefreedom to read - his appetite for books just then was voracious.He enjoyed a mixed diet of religion, politics, and psychology insuch authors as D. T. Suzuki, Keyserling, Nietzsche, Lao-tzu,

Feuchtwanger, Bergson, Madame Blavatsky, Anatole France,Havelock Ellis, Bernard Shaw, Robert Graves, and Carl Jung;and in such works as the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, and theDiamond Sutra.His change of religion had not noticeably diminished his arro-

gance. He challenged the headmaster to abolish flogging on thegrounds of "its sexual complications." Norman Birley seems tohave received the admonition with his usual good-natured interestin Watts's precocity, without feeling a compelling need to act onhis advice. Another of Watts's targets was the Officers' TrainingCorps, common in those days in most public schools. While moststudents accepted such a militaristic body unquestioningly, Wattsexpressed open contempt for the violence it represented.To become opinionated, even eccentrically so, was not frowned

upon for boys in the senior part of the school. In fact, such schoolsencouraged that kind of confidence, self-assurance, and independ-ence of mind. So there was some grudging admiration for Watts'sdetermined support of unpopular causes and unusual beliefs. Nodoubt he delighted to shock - as much as his contemporarieswere delighted to be shocked - when he defended conscientiousobjection or attacked capital punishment. At school debating soci-eties he talked about Chinese and Japanese art - material entirelynew to the British school curriculum - and gave lectures on OmarKhayyam and the Japanese poet Basho.Teachers do not always appreciate the sort of outstanding intel-

ligence that goes its own way, a way often quite different from thatof the examination syllabus. Watts's teachers hoped that he wouldwin a history scholarship at Trinity College, Oxford. His chancesof doing so were, one might think, excellent, and without such ascholarship there was no chance of the Wattses' being able toafford to send their son to a university.But Watts did an odd thing. Instead of simply sitting the exam-

4° ZEN EFFECTS

--The Education of a Brahmin 41

inations like anyone else and doing the best he could with them,he took it into his head to answer the questions in the manner ofNietzsche, a whim so quixotic that it lost him his scholarship.Various explanations come to mind. Was it pure arrogance, a feel-ing that he should be allowed to do anything and get away withit? Was it a kind of contempt for Oxford and its examinations?Was it a fear of failing so great that he felt a need to providehimself with a perfect excuse? To have tried openly and honestlyand then failed might have felt like an intolerable humiliation.Or was it that he needed to escape from the pressure of his parents'high expectations? His own, later explanation of his action andfailure was that he was bored by school and by the idea of Oxford,and was much more interested in his own program of reading,thinking, and experience than anything the university was likelyto provide.It is easy to accept his suggestion that nothing was lost by his

missing Oxford, that on the contrary he gained by getting a moreunusual education. Certainly his mind was naturally scholarly, andhe combined this quality with an originality of thought shown byfew academics. Yet it is difficult also not to suspect a hurdle he wasafraid to jump, dreading competition from others possibly moreclever than himself, a possible blow to his self-esteem. The gestureof failing the scholarship, apart from being a bitter disappoint-ment to Laurence and Emily, started him off on a career as an out-sider, one he was often later to regret. He had stepped off the pathprescribed for Englishmen entering the professions - prep school,public school, university - and was never able to find it again. Itcould have been a courageous act, or an act of protest against theelitism of the Brahmins, but it looked a lot more like pique or lossof nerve.By the time he sat the scholarship examination, of course, he

was thoroughly impatient with the whole system - the Angli-canism, the "boiled beef" culture, and in particular the absence ofgirls. He longed to get to know girls, but was shy about it whenopportunity offered.By the autumn of 1932 he had become head boy of his house,

the Grange, and no longer had to live in a cubicle in a dormitory.His own room was Elizabethan, with fine windows and ceilingmoldings, which lent dignity and prestige to its temporary owner.More important, it also gave him privacy. In the winter he couldlight a fire in the grate and sit up late studying, and here he beganto learn about meditation. At first he sat and puzzled about whatit was that the Oriental masters of meditation described, his mindpicturing all the theories he had read about snapping round hisheels like little dogs. He writes of his first successful attempt atmeditation, "Suddenly I shouted at all of them to go away. I an-nihilated and bawled out every theory and concept of what shouldbe my properly spiritual state of mind, or of what should be meantby ME. And instantly my weight vanished. I owned nothing. Allhang-ups disappeared. I walked on air.',3(j

Christmas Zen 43

Three

ChristmasZen1932-1938

CHRISTMAS HUMPHREYS was a man with the kind of pa-nache that had already appealed to Alan Watts in other models.Initially he enjoyed the security and confidence of a wealthy patri-cian background, but this confidence was badly shaken when hisbrother was killed during the First World War. It was then thathe began to seek something that offered him more than the con-ventional and unquestioned Anglicanism of his class. This searchgradually led him to Buddhism. As an undergraduate at Cam-bridge he had read Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's works, and incompany with Henry Dicks, later a distinguished psychiatrist, hehad taken up Theosophy. He was called to the bar and eventuallybecame a well-known judge. In the twenties he became seriouslyinterested in Buddhism, and he started what was known as theBuddhist Lodge in London.At a time when many Britons showed a kind of imperialist

contempt for religions other than Christianity, it was unusual fora man of Humphreys's social and professional distinction to showa deep and abiding interest in Eastern religion - this interest re-

vealed his originality, his openmindedness, his almost unshakableself-confidence, and, maybe, his wish to be singular. As the Bud-dhist Lodge began to grow, his fellow British Buddhists recognizedthat he was larger than life, a born performer with just a touch ofham, a kindly and generous man who did much to further theknowledge of Buddhism in England. "One cannot fairly charac-terize Mr. Humphreys as a great spiritual original," a fellowBuddhist wrote after his death in 1983, "one who attained deep in-sight or realization, nor as a guru or spiritual teacher in the strictestsense. Rather he was a great proselytizer, popularizer and energizer- a great catalyst, in fact. He got ideas - Buddhist ideas - cir-culating; he got groups going; he got things happening. And hewas able to do this because he was endowed with a unique com-bination of talents and advantages - most of them of an unusu-ally high order."!Having corresponded with Toby, as Christmas was known to

his friends, while at school, Alan Watts started attending BuddhistLodge meetings during the holidays, which took place in the flat ofToby and his wife Aileen (she was known as Puck) in Pimlico.Emily and Laurence, with their habitual loyalty to Alan and hisenthusiasms, accompanied him on his voyage outside the Christianfaith, Emily as an occasional visitor, Laurence eventually as a prac-ticing Buddhist who later became treasurer of the Lodge. Hum-phreys introduced a very English, and curiously Protestant, noteinto the proceedings - Emily, who had reason to know, com-plained that he ran the Lodge like an old-fashioned Sunday School.The young Watts, however, found in the silence, the conversa-

tion, the ideas, the obvious admiration for him of Toby and Puck,who had no children of their own, exactly the spiritual home hewas looking for. For his part, Humphreys felt some special qualityin Watts.

44 ZEN EFFECTS Christmas Zen 45"The boy didn't just talk about Zen," Humphreys used to say

later, to fellow Buddhists, "he talked Zen."Watts began to go mote and mote to the Humphreyses' flat-

it was

a hideawaywith a bright fire,Persian rugs, incense,golden Buddhas,and a library of magical books which promisedme the most arcanesecrets of the universe.... Toby and Puck gave me an educationwhich no money could possiblybuy, and the depth of my grarirudeto them is immeasurable. Even though I now [that is, in I973Jremonstrate against some of Toby's interpretations of Buddhism, Ishall love him always as the man who really set my imaginationgoing and put me on my whole way of life."

To begin with, Watts was probably as fascinated by Theosophyas by Buddhism. He was avid for "arcane secrets." All his life hewas someone who loved to "know," either the kind of secrets thatgave him technical mastery, or the deeper kinds of knowledgethat offered intellectual grasp or control - there always seemedsomething boyish about this, as of the little boy convinced that theadults were conniving at keeping some essential secret from him.One of the appeals of Buddhism for Watts was that it seemed

to offer some release from the guilts of Christianity with its deep-dyed sense of sin, and from the lonely responsibilities of Protes-tantism. The Buddhist belief in karma, which suggested neitherpraise nor blame, merely a recognition of the energy bubblingthrough the universe, was much more congenial. Buddhist bodhi,or wisdom, seemed to Watts more loving in practice than Christianagape, or love.Humphreys resisted Watts's attempts to turn him into a guru,

but for some years Watts's life centered on the flat in Pimlico, andmany of his friends, ideas, and aspirations were filtered to himthrough it. In some ways Humphreys was a natural successor as a

role model to Francis Croshaw - the easy wealth, the aesthetictaste, the unconventionality, the interest in the exotic were allthere. His arrival in Watts's life at this time was fortunate; Cro-shaw had just suffered a tragic death by falling from an upstairswindow in his home in circumstances that might have indicatedsuicide.Like Croshaw, Humphreys loved travel and the arts. The

Diaghilev ballet was in London, and Toby and Puck introducedWatts to the sweeping staircases, velvet curtains, and glitteringchandeliers of Covent Garden. Toby dressed splendidly for theoccasion in a cape and top hat; he carried white gloves and anivory-handled cane. Watts, used to his parents' more sober tastesat home and the austerity of school life, was captivated by it all.Through the Humphreys and the ballet Watts got to know

many Russian emigres and acquired a love of Russian music. Hewas also introduced by Humphreys to a budokwai, a school of judoand kendo (fencing), as well as a Japanese form of exercise, ju-no-kata, rather like what many people know now in its Chineseform as tai chi. He never became a great exponent of any of thesearts, but said that they taught him "how to use my feet, how to

dance, how to generate energy by following the line of leastresistance.?"Humphreys's glowing admiration for the boy who talked Zen

was in strong contrast to the feelings of many of Watts's ownrelatives, who could only see him as a boy who had thrown awayon a whim his chance of attending a university. The Great De-pression was not a promising time to emerge into the adult worldwithout either the degrees of the professional man or the skills ofthe workman, and family councils were held about "what to dowith Alan." Laurence, with the help of Uncle Harry, had recentlygot himself a job as a fundraiser in an organization called the

ZEN EFFECTS Christmas Zen 47Metropolitan Hospital-Sunday Fund. By pulling strings he man-aged to get the seventeen-year-old Watts a job there too, and thetwo of them traveled up each morning from Chislehurst to theMansion House, the official residence of the lord mayor of London,where the fund had its offices. The job never seemed to engagevery much of Watts's attention, but it left him free to pursue hisown interests in the evenings and at weekends. In fact, findinghimself at last turned loose in London, free of the restrictive worldof school, felt glorious to him.The London of the early 1930S was quite an exciting milieu.

The worlds both of the arts and of psychology were hugely en-riched by the many distinguished refugees from Hitler's Germany,and politics and religion were widely discussedwith enthusiasm. Anumber of these currents crossed in the Humphreyses' drawingroom, and Warts, so alert, so alive, so enthusiastically intelligentabout all that life had to offer him, moved enraptured from oneenthralling conversation to another. Part of the charm of this newworld was that, unlike the world of school, it included women,and Warts was anxious to get to know women. So far he had notovercome a lingering sense of shyness, but he felt he only neededa bit more practice and the help of a willing female accompliceto explore the mysteries of sex with him. Meanwhile he practicedhis charm on his cousin Joy, who remembers him affectionatelyfrom this period of their lives. To her he seemed a confident,highly articulate youth, one who was kind and thoughtful to hisyounger and shyer cousin, talking to her at length, doing his bestto make her laugh, telling her funny stories, and drawing herpictures.The main problem facing Watts at this time was that he still

lived at home. Like many a young man, he dreamed of a flat ofhis own where his evenings and any potential romances would

not be cut short by his need to catch the late train home. Notsurprisingly, he also longed to get away from Emily. His relation-ship with her had come to be one of courteous emotional distance ,as it would be for the rest of their lives. His friendship with hisfather, on the other hand, bloomed and flourished:

He went for long walks with me on weekends through the hills ofKent, during which we discussed all the basic problems of life,admired haystacks, views of the Weald, and ancient churches andmansions.We drank beer and ate excellent bread and cheese- thetart and solid Cheddar, and sometimes the blue Cheshire- at vil-lage pubs. Almost invariably he accompaniedme to sessionsat theBuddhist Lodge.... He is a quiet, serene man who never says any-thing unless it is really worth saying, and I cannot imagine a morecompanionable father!

Laurence Watts might, one supposes, have expressed his disap-pointment that Alan had not lived up to his parents' hopes of auniversity scholarship, but Watts says he fell readily in with hisson's plan to design his own "higher education." Maybe Alan hadconvinced his father that "no literate, inquisitive, and imaginativeperson needs to go to college unless in need of a union card, ordegree, as a certified lawyer, or teacher, or unless he requires accessto certain heavy and expensive equipment for scientific researchwhich he himself cannot afford.:" Laurence had a way of thinkingalmost everything about Alan perfect, at least until a later phaseof his life when he profoundly violated his father's moral code.Still, on the long tramps through the Weald and over the lunchesof beer and bread and cheese, Warts's father was an importantsource of companionship and support.

Quite quickly after leaving school Warts was able to get to know,mainly through Humphreys's introductions, a circle of friends that

ZEN EFFECTS Christmas Zen 49

would have shocked his Evangelical relatives if they had known.One of these was a young man, Nigel Watkins, who ran an esotericbookshop in Cecil Court in Charing Cross Road. The shop carriedbooks on a most extraordinary range of subjects: "Oriental philos-ophy, magic, astrology, Masonry, meditation, Christian mysticism,alchemy, herbal medicine and every occult and far-out subjectunder the sun.?" The shop was also a Mecca for an extraordinaryrange of customers: serious seekers of knowledge who could notsatisfy their curiosity elsewhere in sober England, visiting Asians,people like Watts who wanted to learn "arcane secrets," and quitea few who were frankly curious about much that seemed to beleft out of a conventional education. It thus became the haunt ofa wonderful blend of gurus, priests, witches, psychotherapists,lamas, and mahatmas, and ordinary officeworkers who happenedto have wandered in during the lunch hour.Watts quickly became friends with Watkins, and especially

appreciated the fact that Watkins was frank about which materialin his shop he regarded as genuine and which as rubbish. He waswell informed and equally frank about what various gurus inLondon had to offer. One day he introduced Watts to anothercustomer also called Alan Watts, who, for a brief period, was animportant influence on his young namesake. The elder Watts wasliving with a woman young Watts regarded as stunningly beau-tiful, and, emboldened by this fact perhaps, Watts asked all thequestions about sex that he had never felt prepared to ask anyoneat home or at school. The older Watts not only answered thosequestions sensitively and helpfully, but he also introduced him tothe works of Freud and Adler and to the theory of psychoanalysis.Finally, he began to speak of a very special guru he consultedhimself, Dmitrije Mitrinovic, from Yugoslavia, who, he told theyoung Watts, was probably "a high initiate into the mysteries ofthe universe."

Watts needed no more. This was just the kind of person he waslooking for, and he wasted no time in getting to know Mitrinovic,who was exotic enough to live up to Watts's wildest hopes andexpectations. Mitrinovic lived in Bloomsbury, on Gower Street, inthose days a quiet, early Victorian street in a modest part of Londonwhere many writers had lived. Somehow Mitrinovic contrived tomake his perfectly ordinary house seem like a secret and exoticEastern sanctuary, to which it was an extraordinary privilege to beinvited. The rooms were dark, heavily scented with incense, deco-rated with fine Oriental objets d'art and with rare editions ofbooks, often with an Eastern flavor. He lived surrounded by friendswho were more like disciples, and by women, all of whom seemedto the admiring Watts to be "adoring" of the masterful Mitrinovic.He often held court late at night - I r :00 P.M. was a favoritetime for entertaining - which made it difficult for a young fellowwho needed to get back to Mum and Dad in Chislehurst on a trainthat left before midnight. On one occasion when Watts threwdiscretion to the winds and stayed on, Mitrinovic sent him homeat 3 :00 A.M. in a chauffeur-driven limousine. He had what theyoung Watts most admired - styIe,Part of his fascination was his appearance. He had a shaved

head, high Slavonic cheekbones, black winglike eyebrows, andeyes that were large and hypnotic. For his rare daytime appear-ances he was meticulously dressed in a bowler hat, of the kindfavored by Winston Churchill, a cutaway black morning coat, andstriped trousers. He completed this outfit by carrying a walkingstick with an amber handle. He paid all bills in the large, beautifulfive-pound notes of the period, white, crisp, and designed to looklike legal documents; he drank huge amounts of whiskey, withoutapparently becoming drunk; and he smoked outsize cigarettes.Watts realized that he was fascinated by the man, but that he

was also quite frightened of him - in Buddhist and Theosophical

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circles the word was out that he was a black magician. If he was,he never revealed the terrible secrets to Watts.Mitrinovic obviously liked Watts, took him out with other

friends to Hungarian, Russian, and Greek restaurants in Soho andhome to long absorbing conversations. At home Mitrinovic puton loose robes and held court sitting on his bed. Warts remembershis discussing the principles of unity and differentiation in the uni-verse - ideas important in Watts's later thinking - and howthe two principles went together. In fact he was introducing Wattsto what the Japanese call ji-ji-mu-ge - an understanding of themutual interdependence of all things and events.Although Watts, influenced by Humphreys's Theosophical

ideas, went through a period of wondering whether Mitrinovicwas one of the secret "Masters" in touch with the ancient knowl-edge, his relationship with him moved gradually onto a moreordinary level. One of Mirrinovic's ideas was to develop thethought of Alfred Adler on lines that would nowadays perhaps becalled co-counseling. Mitrinovic, Watts, the other Alan Warts, aphysicist, and a psychoanalyst, embarked upon a "no-holds-barredmutual psychoanalysis." For some months they met on a regularbasis for some hours at a time during which period Watts remem-bered that they "resolutely destroyed and rebuilt each other'spersonalities."Mitrinovic was remarkable for his times in that he seemed fully

to grasp the kind of threat that Adolf Hitler posed and advocatedstern opposition to him by Britain and France. He was a socialistof sorts, who believed in doing away with money and in makingworkers stockholders in industry. He followed Rudolph Steiner inhis concept of the threefold state (with three assemblies, one polit-ical, one economic, one cultural) and in a federation of Europe. Heinvented a movement called the New Britain Movement, which

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planned to do away with money, and published a magazine out-lining his political ideas that Alan tried to sell for him at PiccadillyCircus.

In the years that followed, Watts was to show little interest inpolitics; rather, his two principal interests would later be psychol-ogy and religion, and both of these were foreshadowed by hisyouthful adventures in London. He became friends with theJungian analyst Philip Metman and an even closer friend of thepsychiatrist Eric Graham Howe. (It was typical of Watts thatyears later he clearly remembered what Howe had given him forlunch at their first meeting - a fine potato baked in its jacket andsmothered with butter.) Perhaps what psychology seemed to offerwas yet another form of arcane secrets, knowledge, or power. Oneday Howe introduced Warts to Frederic Spiegelberg, an Orientalphilosopher who was to be important in Watts's life years later inCalifornia. Spiegelberg made an indelible impression on Watts:"He wore a hat with an exceedingly wide brim, spoke Englishwith a delicate German accent which always suggests a sense ofauthority and high culture, and was propagating the theory thatthe highest form of religion was to transcend religion. He calledit the religion of non-religion."7The religion of nonreligion ... It so happened that about the

time he was considering Spiegelberg's ideas, Watts was beingintroduced by Humphreys to D. T. Suzuki, a tiny Japanese, withpebble glasses and a bow tie, who was to influence Watts andmany other Westerners in an extraordinary way. Then in his latesixties, Suzuki had led an interesting and varied life. Born ofsamurai stock, he had nevertheless grown up in near poverty be-cause of the early death of his father. He had been a clever school-boy, working hard at other languages including English, and he

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had been keenly interested in studies in Rinzai Zen. He studiedunder Kosenroshi and then under Soyen Shaku. Soyen gave theyouth the koan Mu ("Nothingness" as a subject for meditation)and Rick Fields, the author of How the Swans Came to the Lake,movingly quotes his struggles with it:

I was busy during those four years with various writings ... but allthe time the koan was worrying at the back of my mind. It was,without any doubt, my chief preoccupation and I remember sirtingin a field leaning against a stack of rice and thinking that if I couldnot understand Mu, life had no meaning for me. Nishida Kitarowrote somewhere in his diary that I often talked about committingsuicide at this period, though I have no recollection of doing somyself. After finding out that I had nothing more to say about MuI stopped going to sanzen with Soyen Shaku, except for the com-pulsory sanzenduring a sesshin.And then all that usually happenedwas that the Roshi hit me.... Ordinarily there are so many choicesone can make, or excusesone can make to oneself. To solve a koanone must be standing at an extremity, with no possibility or choiceconfronting one. There is just one thing which one must do."

In the winter sesshin (a marathon of "sitting") Suzuki put allhis strength into solving the torturing koan, and realization hap-pened. Walking back to his quarters in the moonlight the treeslooked transparent, and he knew himself to be transparent too. In1897, at the age of twenty-seven, Suzuki went to live in the UnitedStates, working in Illinois at a publishing house with religious andOriental interests. He began writing a book in English, Outlinesof Mahayana Buddhism, a book expressing his passionate beliefin the living quality of Buddhism. Later he would return to Japanand marry an American women, Beatrice Lane, in 19 I I. Togetherthe two of them worked on an English-language journal, TheEastern Buddhist, and in 1927 the British publisher Rider com-

bined some of these essays with new ones to bring out Suzuki'sEssays in Zen Buddhism. It was this remarkable book that morethan any other was to attract Westerners to Zen.It was not an easy book to read. The mixture of learning and

playfulness, not to mention the unconventional subject and theideas surrounding it, left readers interested but baffled. Many peo-ple bought it - it soon went into second and third volumes ofessays- but few seemed to know quite what to make of it. Japa-nese scholars at Western universities seemed to resent Suzuki'ssuccess and accused him simultaneously of "popularizing" Zen(they meant cheapening it) and of being impenetrably obscure.The American Oriental Society, famed for the austerity of its ap-proach, gave the opinion in its journal that he was a dilettante, andothers complained that he was not keen enough on "discipline."Watts, however, following Christmas Humphreys, felt love,

admiration, and reverence for Suzuki. One of the first times Wartsever saw him was during a particularly boring meeting at theBuddhist Lodge. Suzuki was playing with a kitten, and somethingabout the old man's total absorption in the tiny creature gaveWarts the feeling that he was "seeing into its Buddha-nature."Something in Suzuki the man, as well as in his writings, told

Watts that he had found the principal teacher for his private uni-versity, the master he had been looking for. Suzuki had none ofthe expensive, ostentatious habits, the easy cosmopolitan airs, orthe cultural aims of Watts's other models, but his stillness and hissmile touched something lonely and lost in Watts, offered a hintof a way out not merely from acting instead of being oneself, butalso from the predicament of being isolated and human, fromwhat Warts often thought of as a "bag of skin." Already interestedin Zen, Watts was now fired with a passionate concern to absorbit. Like many writers before him, he found a way to give the

54 ZEN EFFECTS Christmas Zen 55

utmost concentration to a new enthusiasm - he would write abook about it.His working days were still devoted to raising money for the

London hospitals, but with the self-discipline that was later tomark his use of time, he decided to devote a month to writingThe Spirit of Zen in his spare time. Instead of spending his eve-nings eagerly dashing off from the office to fascinating meetingswith his new friends, or his weekends haunting the Humphreyses,he went soberly home each night and wrote a thousand words orso, and within a month had fulfilled his aim - a book of aroundthirty-five thousand words. It is easy to sense the pleasure withwhich it was written, a particular sort of freshness and enthusiasmthat is infinitely touching. He dedicated the book to his masterChristmas Humphreys, but wrote a humble and moving prefaceto Suzuki, saying how much he owes to his writings, and urgingthe reader to attempt the Essays, presumably using The Spirit ofZen as a sort of guide.The book is self-confessedly derivative, but it is an astonishing

achievement for a writer of nineteen. Writing a preface to thesecond edition twenty years later, Watts wished that his knowledgeof Chinese had been better when using translated texts, so that hecould have been more critical, that he had had a more academicknowledge of Zen, and that, before he began the work, he hadseen more clearly the ludicrousness of "explaining Zen." (If thepurpose of Zen is to help people "go out of their minds" in orderto stumble upon the nonrational truth, then explaining it is notlikely to get them very far.)Whatever failings Watts later perceived in the book, it had,

and has, a very special quality, consisting partly of Watts's lovefor Suzuki and for Zen, and partly of the revelation of a new sideof Watts -loving and undefended - which, as he grew older, l/,

would appear more rarely in public. There is also intelligence,simplicity, passionate enthusiasm, and the first evidence of a mas-terly gift for describing religious and philosophical thought lucidlyand provocatively. There is nothing youthful in any crude orunskillful sense; it is balanced, thoughtful, and excellently writtenby a cultured mind.For the first of many times in his life, Watts describes the isola-

tion of the individual with his or her impossible cravings, and theZen method of trying to shock or baffle a way out of this "de-fended castle." Here Watts follows the Buddha's insight into theunity of all living things, and his charge to replace hostility bydivine compassion, karuna.Watts sees Zen as a vigorous attempt to come into direct con-

tact with the truth itself without allowing theories and symbols tostand between the knower and the known. The method, he says,is to "baffle, excite, puzzle and exhaust the intellect until it isrealized that intellection is only thinking about." Similarly withthe emotions, with which the aim is to "provoke, irritate and ex-haust" so that it becomes clear that emotion is only "feelingabout." All this so that a kind of leap can take place betweensecondhand conceptual contact and reality itself.He moves on to look brieRy at the history of Buddhism and the

aspects of it that interest him most. The Buddha was once asked,"What is the Se1£?"and he refused for a long time to answer.Eventually he said that "man will find out only when he no longeridentifies himself with his person, when he no longer resists theexternal world from within its fortifications, in fact, when hemakes an end of his hostility and his plundering expeditionsagainst life."9 The alternative to this "philosophy of isolation," asthe Buddha called it, was the sense of the unity of living things,and the need to replace hostility with karuna.

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Watts examines the different views Mahayana and HinayanaBuddhism have on the question of the Self.

What is found when man no longer resists life from behind thebarrier of his person? Because the Buddha denied the existence ofany "self-nature" in the person, the Hinayana takes this to meanthat there is no Self at all. The Mahayana, on the other hand, con-siders that a true Self is found when the false one is renounced.When man neither identifieshimself with his person nor uses it asa means of resisting life, he finds that the Self is more than hisown being; it includes the whole universe. The Hinayana, realizingthat no single thing as such is the Self, is content with that realiza-tion.... But the Mahayana couples this denial with an affirmation;while denying the existence of Self in any particular thing, it findsit in the total interrelatedness of all things. Thus Enlightenment isto deny the self in the castle, to realize that Self is not this personcalled "I" as distinct from that person called "You," but that it isboth "I" and "You" and everything else included.l''

Watts, in his search for nonseparatedness, was selecting theMahayana path, and the particular form of Mahayana Buddhismknown as Zen. Within that he concluded that "the true Self is notan idea but an experience," the experience which comes to passwhen the "mind has voided every metaphysical premise, everyidea with which it attempts to grasp the nature of the world."Although in our ignorance, we continually lose sight of this fact,the Self, the experience, is no less than "the Buddha nature." "Anordinary man is in truth a Buddha just as he is" - his difficultyis to be brought to know it.In The Spirit of Zen Warts also recounts many of the famous

Zen stories that show pupils, in laughter, pain, anger, grief, sud-denly getting the point, achieving enlightenment in a sudden,astounding flash of intuition. By that flash of intuition, satori, thewilled but painful separateness of egoism is overcome. Even striv-ing after Buddhahood implies a fatal distinction between oneself

and the Buddha-nature. "While the ego works at its own spiritualbetterment it is already separated from the rest of life, isolatedfrom other beings, and this is a lesser form of lunacy, for thelunatic is the most isolated person in the world.'?"With hindsight we can see Watts preaching to himself the

answer to his own painful loneliness and know that, as is the habitof preachers, he was never entirely to benefit from his own wisdom.Curiously, in the book he treats Zen rather more like a work of

art than a living discipline available to Westerners. He describeslife in Zen monasteries with a rose-colored attitude that he wouldlater renounce, but he does not seem to expect the reader to wishto try Zen techniques like zazen, and he does not trouble to givethe outwardly simple details of how this is done. Zen, he says, is"for the few," as elitist a way of life, he implies, as a taste forChinese and Japanese art is for the handful of people who havedeveloped a "high culture." Later he would change this view, orrather, events would change it for him. But the book remains animportant one for those interested in Watts; at the age of nineteen(twenty when the book was published by John Murray in 1935),he had managed to state, in a rudimentary way, most of the ideasthat would interest and occupy him for the rest of his life.He was to see much more of Suzuki. In 1936, "that year of true

grace in my life," as Warts called it, the World Congress of Faithsmet in London, sponsored by the Himalayan explorer, Sir FrancisYounghusband. All kinds of distinguished scholars, philosophers,religious leaders, and writers were there, from many different kindsof backgrounds, but so far as Warts was concerned, Suzuki, withhis simplicity, his spontaneity, his humor, stole the show.

Suzuki's feeling for the basic reality of Zen was ... elusive, andthe moment you thought you had finally grasped his point he wouldslip from your grasp like wet soap ... thereby showing that Zen issomething like dancing or the movement of a ball on a mountain

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stream. But neither is it mere chaos, just as the flow-p.atterns.inflame and water are animated designs of great complexity, which

.. d 12the Chinese caUti, the markings in jade or the gram m woo .

Suzuki could be very critical of Zen as practiced in Japan, sayingthat it would be best if all the monasteries could be burned down.He practiced zazen only occasionally (it was one of the things h.isenemies had against him), but was known for being able to slipinto samadhi, a sort of reverent concentration (or maybe it wassleep, no one quite knew which), at stressful moments. Like !esusfalling asleep during the storm on the sea of Galilee, Suzuki wasgood at dropping off during turbulent airplane flights, a child. athome in the universe, unworried and serene. He seemed to livespontaneously, without calculation, and without rigid conceptualdistinctions between himself and others, or between himself andobjects or animals. He used the force of gravity, Watts mysteriouslyclaims "as a sailor uses the wind."Suzuki gave a paper about Mahayana Buddhism, denying the

Western cliche attitude that it was a rejection of life and an escapefrom it; on the contrary, said Suzuki, it meant total acceptance ofall life's vicissitudes, it meant compassion for all sentient beings,and it meant becoming a master of samsara the world of birthand death. Watts introduced the discussion of this notable paper,and thereafter he attended every lecture and seminar that Suzukigave. The Zen "boom" in which distinguished psychoanalyststherapists, artists, composers, and writers were to flock to Suzuki,Erich Fromm and Karen Horney among them, did not happenuntil the 1950S. Suzuki was not the easiest of teachers tobecause his method was so strange. "Teaching," according to RickFields,

in addition to being a way of earning a living v:as a way of.think-. I d bout whatever books or translations [Suzuki] hap-mg out ou a

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pened to be working on, and it was not uncommon for him to losestudents as he crisscrossedthe blackboard with a bewildering mazeof diagrams and notes in Japanese, Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan.Mary Farkas, a student who audited the class occasionally,rernem-bers counting asmany as a dozen people sleeping in their chairs oneafternoon. Not that it bothered Suzuki. Once, John Cage tells, alow-flying plane drowned out Suzuki's voice in mid-sentence, butSuzuki simply continued speaking, without bothering to raise thelevel of his voice.l"

The energy of young Watts was at its height. He was nowreading and writing Mandarin Chinese quite well, he was stillpracticing martial arts at the budokwai, he had changed his hand-writing to a beautiful italic, and trained himself in a thoroughknowledge of graphics, layout, and lettering. He was readingwidely not just in Buddhism, but in Vedanta, Taoism, and theChristian mystics; with Eric Graham Howe's advice he was alsoexploring the writings of Jung.Would Watts have benefited more intellectually if he had at-

tended a conventional university? Judging by contemporary biog-raphies and autobiographies, relatively few undergraduates of theperiod read, wrote, or thought as studiously as Watts did. OrientalStudies were fairly limited at English universities, and most stu-dents would not have had the chance to mingle as freely as Wattsdid with such an interesting variety of thinkers and talkers. Allhis life Warts had a knack for finding people who were originalwithout being eccentric and of seeing quickly to the nub of theirideas before making them his own.

If his pursuit of knowledge and of interesting people came easilyto him, his pursuit of "girls" did not. Watts had left school withthe naive belief that women would be as eager as he was forsexual experiment, and all he needed to do was to find one who

60 ZEN EFFECTS Christmas Zen 61attracted him. To his surprise it took him a year or two to findany girls with whom he felt a sense of rapport, and even then, tohis disappointment, they seemed unwilling to go beyond the pre-liminaries. He did not despise the pleasures of what was later tobe known as "necking," but when weeks and months took him nofurther, he became exasperated. It was, as he inimitably put it, "allretch and no vomit." It was gradually borne in on him that girlswere conditioned to withhold their sexual favors as a prize thatwent with marriage (their very real fears of pregnancy seem notto have occurred to him) , and this made him feel that he was thevictim of an infuriating game. If there could be no sexual freedomwithout marriage, and if, as he believed to be the case, there wasno chance of his affording marriage until he was at least thirty,then the prospects for a lusty young man were deeply depressing.Part of the torment was that he was not sure whether his failure

with girls was due to lack of experience and technique. Infectiouslyself-confident in most other matters, he felt anxious and unsureabout his sexuality. Looking back from the vantage point of nearlyforty years later, he puzzled about his failure to consummate arelationship before the age of twenty-two (though this may nothave been as uncommon among his contemporaries as he seems toassume). Perhaps in the end it came down to something quitesimple: "They were scared, and I was afraid of rejection.""He started his romantic life with a girlfriend named Betty,

whose would-be liberated style was somewhat cramped by an over-anxious mother. Finally, Betty alienated Watts by joining theOxford Group, the religious organization later known as MoralRearmament, which relied heavily on piety, guilt, and group con-fession. Anything less likely to appeal to the youthful Watts orless promising to the sexual adventurer in him would be hard toimagine. There was another girl called Greta who seemed con-

stantly to promise ecstasies she was never ready to fulfill; in theend Watts got on rather better with her brother, with whom hewent on camping expeditions. The most promising liaison waswith a Danish au pair girl, Hilda, who would "kiss and hug likea mink," but deeper involvement was always interrupted by Watts'sneed to go and catch the I I : 55 train. Perhaps he was more scaredthan he later remembered. In any case, the sexual mores of thetime were against him. "Nice girls" were not expected to do muchmore than kiss before marriage, and in addition to warnings ofpregnancy, they were told that "men wouldn't respect them" ifthey gave way to desire. Underlying all of this was a dimly under-stood belief that Christianity thought fornication was wrong, butalso an atttiude toward sexuality that insisted that "ladies" didn'tenjoy sex and that there was something beastly in men which re-grettably did. It was not a healthy foundation for sexual experi-ence, forcing many into marriage before they were ready for it, asthe only "decent" way of satisfying their sexual desires. The youngWatts, not surprisingly, was at war with this damaging and un-realistic approach to natural feelings, and there was pain and be-wilderment at his initial inability to persuade well-brought-upyoung women to see the matter as he did. All this changed ratherquickly, however, when Eleanor Everett came into his life.The first time he saw her was at the Buddhist Lodge early in

1937· Her mother, Ruth Fuller Everett, had come to give a talkabout her stay at a Zen monastery in Kyoto two years before.Mother and daughter, apparently devoted to one another, had anair of easy American wealth; money and the style that went withit had often fascinated Watts in the past, but this time it came ina new guise.Ruth Everett, a rather formidable lady, knew more about Zen

than Watts. Like many American society ladies she had, some

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years previously, come under the influence of a man who, likeAleister Crowley or Mitrinovic, could be described as a "rascal-guru," one Pierre Bernard, who owned a sort of ashram in Nyackon the Hudson River and taught tantric and hatha yoga. At NyackRuth discovered the existence of Zen Buddhism and, with the sub-lime self-confidence that marked all her actions, simply took offfor Japan with the fifteen-year-old Eleanor and introduced herselfto Suzuki, who in turn introduced her to Nanshinken, the famousroshi of the picturesque monastery Nanzenji. Ruth insisted onbeing allowed to sit zazen at the monastery, thus making her andEleanor the first Western women ever to do so, but Nanshinkenseemed to prefer Eleanor's company and liked to sit out on hisveranda showing her pictures of sumo wrestlers he thought mightappeal to her as possible husbands.Ruth, though she later became a serious student of Zen, was

perhaps initially seeking some solace for a wretched marriage. Atthe age of eighteen she had married Warren Everett, a famousChicago attorney who represented well-known industrialists. Itbecame clear to her almost at once that Warren was less interestedin her as a woman than as a competent housekeeper and a decora-tive hostess. She had great intelligence and gradually acquired wideaesthetic and religious knowledge as compensation for an emptyemotional life, but in the beginning she had been a timid girl witha bullying husband, himself trying to compensate for having beencrippled as a child with polio. He was fearfully exacting abouthow the house was run - Ruth remembered years later how thebiscuits served at the table had to have enough fat in them to stainthe napkin they stood on - and he took for granted that it washer job to entertain innumerable business acquaintances whoseinterests were entirely different from her own.Gradually under these pressures a very powerful woman began

to emerge. Eleanor, as the only child of a strong-willed mother and

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an irascible father, had a hard time simply being her own person.She had money to spend, beautiful clothes to wear, a backgroundof extensive travel to exotic places that took Ruth's fancy, but shedid not finish high school, probably because her mother wantedher as a traveling companion. In 1937, however, when Eleanorand her mother came to London, she decided that she wanted tostudy the piano, and she was working with a teacher namedGeorge Woodhouse, a man with a Zenlike approach to pianoplaying.It is striking that Watts devoted as much space in his autobiog-

raphy to Ruth as he did to Eleanor, and it is Ruth who comesacross as the stronger and more interesting personality. Perhaps itwas Ruth, with her knowledge, her formidable power, and hermoney who most deeply fascinated and attracted Watts, but theway to be close to Ruth was to be close to Eleanor.He and Eleanor went to the opera and the ballet and to various

piano concerts together, always with the most expensive seats, andshe encouraged him to start playing the piano too - he got as faras a Scarlatti sonata. She also persuaded him to dance - a thingmost inhibited Englishmen of his generation found almost un-imaginable except in the most formal circumstances. Eleanor hadpicked up the hula on a trip to Hawaii and taught him the swingof the hips that makes true dancing possible.Eleanor was not precisely pretty, but was a pleasing, slightly

plump girl, with a vivacity that made her fun as a companion; shewore lovely clothes that Watts's cousins admired and envied, hadmoney to spend and an air of sophistication. She was talented andappeared supremely self-confident. Always perceptive, Watts prob-ably knew that beneath the culture, the fine clothes, the extremehigh spirits, was a girl with little self-esteem who felt intimidatedby her mother and unloved by her father. These feelings, however,would have touched on Watts's own weakness-his pleasure in

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playing a kind of Pygmalion role toward women, to mold themand give them confidence, no doubt in an attempt to relieve fearsand neurotic tendencies of his own. Whatever the reasons, a ro-mance had begun, one that caused interested speculation in theWatts/Buchan clan since Watts had committed himself to thepoint of describing Eleanor to them as "highly satisfactory."

He had other pleasures in 1937, in particular the publication of hisnew book, The Legacy of Asia and Western Man. The ChurchTimes described it in a review as a "witty and perverse little book,"but Watts himself in later years found it somewhat embarrassing.This may have been because it attempted to cover too much ground,but it is a lucid and interesting book, and it reveals much aboutthe way Watts's mind worked in the period immediately followingThe Spirit of Zen.In some ways it is a response to the rather shallow arguments

against Buddhism that his first book provoked, the sort of criticismof which Watts had been happily and unselfconsciously awarewhen he began to write. In his second book he felt obliged totackle questions of whether Buddhism is "impersonal," whetherit "devalues" the individual, whether it lacks "love" and socialconcern.Watts, however, took on a bigger task than defending Bud-

dhism. He began to see every religion as having special gifts ofits own to bring to mankind: Hinduism a very deep understandingof mysticism, Taoism a sense of oneness with the principles of life,Buddhism in all its forms, a developed method of freeing the mindfrom illusion. Inevitably Christianity, the traditional religion ofmost people he was writing for, had somehow to be rediscoveredfor his purposes. He approached it with a certain amount of dis-taste, still resentful of the guilt and shame that surrounded its

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moral teachings, still angry about heaven and hell used as carrotsand sticks to control the simpleminded, and still dubious of theChristian Church's claim to ultimate truth.Yet despite distaste for a religion that, it seemed to him, had

gone collectively sour, Watts admitted to feeling a kind of pulltoward it: "However much we may imagine ourselves to havecut adrift from the Church's symbols, they return to us undermany forms in our dreams and phantasies, when the intellectsleeps and the mind has liberty to break from the rational orderwhich it demands."'5Because Christianity had lost its life and vigor, Watts felt that

modern Western man had lost himself in the "rational," in hu-manistic, scientific, and technocratic modes that derived from apurely rational attitude to life. "It is precisely to preserve us froma 'rational' civilization that a vital Christianity is necessary.":"Having thrown Christianity away he began to feel it return like aboomerang.In The Legacy, borrowing from lung, Watts suggested that

Christianity must learn to see itself much more in symbolic andmythical terms than in historical ones, so that, for example, thePassion and Resurrection of Christ become the pain of the indi-vidual torn between the contradiction of the opposites, and achieve-ment of their eventual resolution, or the birth of the Divine Childbecomes the birth of intuitive love in every person. Watts alsobelieved that assimilating Asian wisdom - in particular the wis-dom relating to the relativity of good and evil, and the recognitionof the way mankind is torn by duality - gave a chance for escap-ing the alienation of duality.The young Watts was applying himself to some of the central

questions for Western man, doing his best to grasp the nature ofthe tragedy. As part of the new understanding he believed that

66 ZEN EFFECTS Christmas Zen

psychotherapy was essential; within the triangle of Eastern reli-gion, Western religion, and psychotherapy, a new beginning forhuman salvation, a new healing, was to be sought.In his two books Watts had now outlined his lifelong preoccu-

pations: the synthesis of Eastern and Western thought, in partic-ular the synthesis of Buddhism and Christianity, and the links ofboth with healing, particularly in the form of psychotherapy. Forthe rest of his life he would think and struggle, read and argue,teach and discuss, make jokes and tell stories about precisely thesequestions.

Eleanor shared Watts's Buddhist preoccupations just as Ruth did.Able to sit in the full lorus position, she came with him to Bud-dhist meetings to sit in zazen, and the two of them faithfully prac-ticed meditation together at home. Once when the two of themwere walking home together from a meditation session he beganto talk about how difficult he found it to concentrate on the pres-ent. "Why try to concentrate on it?" Eleanor asked. "What else isthere to be aware of? Your memories are in the present, just asmuch as the trees over there. Your thoughts about the future arealso in the present, and anyhow I just love to think abour thefuture. The present is just a constant flow ... and there's no wayof getting out of it.'?" Watts found this comment of Eleanor's aminor revelation, one for which he remained grateful to her forthe rest of his life. "You could have knocked me down with afeather ," he said.He was just as grateful to Eleanor for her eagerness to embark

on sexual adventures. Perhaps it accorded with the more liberalsexual ideas of her new religion, perhaps the sense of wealth madethe possible consequences seem less alarming, perhaps she sensedRuth's rather obvious complicity. Ruth went back to America,

leaving Eleanor to Watts's tender mercies, perfectly aware that thetwo were spending most of their spare time together. They tookadvantage of the opportunity, two virgins anxious to lose theirvirginity, two attractive young people who liked each other's com-pany. They very quickly started to believe that they were in love.Ruth's total cooperation is perhaps a little surprising. Known

in Chicago as a social climber, she might have sought and founda better match for her daughter. She might have feared (perhapswith justification) an element of fortune hunting in Watts's court-ship of her daughter, not in any crude sense, but in his simpleexpansive pleasure in the good things of life - good seats at theopera, good restaurants - otherwise not available to him. Sheprobably found him physically attractive, as Eleanor did, and shemay have felt thar his good manners, his elegant Britishness, hischeery insouciance made up for a good deal he lacked in otherways. Certainly his lack of money, or a career, kept the youngpeople under her control to some extent. It was not that she hadany very high opinion of his abilities and potentialities, despite histwo published books. When she left England for America heronly comment about him to Eleanor was, "He's all right, but he'llnever set the Thames on fire."The two young people continued to tryout all the sexual tech-

niques of which Watts had read in books - Eleanor tended toprefer the more conventional methods - and instead of travelinghome on the II: 55 train every night Watts often spent the nightat Eleanor's apartment, something which cannot have had Emily'sapproval. "Living together" was still rather frowned on for anybut the most bohemian. Perhaps this reason pushed the two ofthem, young and inexperienced as they were, towards the possi-bility of marriage.Watts took Eleanor to tea with Emily and Laurence at Rowan

68 ZEN EFFECTS Christmas Zen

Cottage - they had by now moved back and had just celebratedtheir silver wedding anniversary. Eleanor found Rowan Cottagecharming and talked, with her easy American manners, about herhome in Chicago, her life in London. Emily, a little stiff as always,had put herself out to entertain "Alan's girl," and Laurence wasopenly delighted with her. It did not surprise him that his sonshould attract a girl so rich and stylish.Social expectations swept them along; young people in love

were supposed to get married, especially if they could afford todo so. Watts proposed to Eleanor, she accepted, feeling a wonder-ful sense of release from the tyranny of life with her parents, andthe two of them were invited to spend Christmas 1937 withEleanor's family in Chicago. They sailed for New York on theBremen on December 17, but the day before, an engagement partywas held at Rowan Cottage, with all Watts's uncles, aunts, andcousins there to meet the "very sophisticated American fiancee."The journey to America was a delight to Watts. Although he

sensed that the visit to Chicago was set up to be an inspection ofhim, he had no qualms of his success and dived into the deliciousfood on the liner with tremendous pleasure. New York was thenext excitement - thrilling and beautiful- and then the two ofthem boarded the Commodore Vanderbilt train for the night rideto Chicago. The fields gleamed white with snow under the moon,many of the towns and villages were lit with colored lights forChristmas, and Watts went to sleep to the sound of the old steamwhistle as the engine pounded through the night, through townswith magic names like Poughkeepsie, Schenectady, and Ashtabula.In the morning at the La Salle station, they were met by theEveretts' Philippine chauffeur, who tucked them under rugs into asleek limousine, and Watts was on his way to meet the familyfor their holiday celebration, given for them on a royal scale.

Warren Everett, who, at the best of times, was a bad-temperedman with a bullying lawyer's manner, was by now an invalidbadly afflicted by arteriosclerosis, which did not improve his char-acter. To everyone's surprise, he and Watts took to one anotheron sight, Watts later thought because they enjoyed some similarvices - smoking cigars, telling ribald stories, and thumbingthrough girlie magazines. Despite his youth Watts was not fright-ened of Warren, and he showed a genuine interest in the olderman's long and varied career. Although Watts found most of theother Everett relatives he met to be rather boring, he got on quitewell with a number of Eleanor's friends. Then it was back toEngland again on the Bremen, to the fun of trying to dance theViennese waltz on a rolling deck to the music of a Bavarian band.Before taking him home to visit her parents Eleanor had changed

Watts's style of dress, as she was changing so much else in his life.Always biased towards the formal, he had been in the habit ofsporting a mustache, a black Homburg hat, a black formal coatwith striped trousers, a silver-gray tie, chamois gloves, and a rolledumbrella. Eleanor got him our of this rather pompous and old-fashioned gear and into tweed jackets and colored ties.Although a date had not yet been set for the wedding - indeed

their parents might have discouraged setting one until Watts hada "proper job" - in February 1938 Eleanor became pregnant byWatts, and they immediately decided to get married in April.Eleanor was eighteen, Alan twenty-three. Looking back on it after-wards, Watts "could not understand" how it was that two Bud-dhists managed to get married in a Church of England ceremony,at Saint Philip's, Earls Court, one at which Eleanor promised to"love, cherish and obey." Perhaps the reason was simply that Ruthcould have the big society wedding that she had set her heart on.The bride, on Watts's insistence, entered the church to the

Meistersinger overture, and the couple left to a theme from thelast movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. During the takingof the vows the organist gently played a Tchaikovsky melody,which, years later, when it was turned into a popular song, Wattswas amused to notice had the new title "Will This Be Moon Love,Nothing but Moon Love?" These musical details were about theonly say the two of them had in the planning of their wedding.Ruth had taken a maisonette (duplex) for them at Courtfield

Gardens in London, a huge Edwardian mansion with vast rooms.Watts does not make it clear whether the house was already fur-nished, whether Ruth undertook the task for them, or whether heand Eleanor set about spending her very considerable allowancefrom her parents. But the place was curtained with yellow Chinesedamask, carpeted in dark purple, and set about with pieces ofElizabethan and Jacobean furniture. "Almost palatial" was Watts'sdescription of it.They did not stay long to enjoy the splendor. Even the tem-

porary respite of Munich made it clear for those who chose to seeit that war with Germany was bound to come, and that if it did,Watts would be conscripted. He had not the slightest intention ofbecoming a soldier - the idea appalled him from every point ofview - nor did he intend to endure the public obloquy and pos-sible imprisonment inflicted on conscientious objectors. The onlyalternative was flight, and for the young Wattses flight to theUnited States was very easy, with moneyed relatives waiting to

receive them. Perhaps sooner or later the United States would havelured Watts anyway. Ever since the enchanted journey to Chicagohe had been excited by the challenge it offered - perhaps some ofthe wealth would rub off on him?So with Eleanor in the last months of pregnancy, they set off

for New York. Entering the continent via Montreal Watts was

Christmas Zen7° ZEN EFFECTS7 1

stopped by a U.S. immigration officer who noticed that he carrieda stick."Whaddya carry a cane for? You sick?""Not at all," Watts replied. "It's JUStfor swank."Once in New York, the young couple was installed by Ruth in

an apartment next to hers at the Park Crescent Hotel, at Eighty-seventh and Riverside, and here in November Eleanor gave birthto a daughter, Joan. The future, despite the war, looked personallypromrsing.

The Towers of Manhattan 73

Four

The TowersofManhattan1938-1941

MANHATTAN SEEMED DANGEROUS, fast, foreign, almostunbearably exciting to the young Alan Watts, entirely differentfrom the familiarity and coziness of 1930S London. He was fasci-nated by the sight of so many different races of people in thestreets and by the enormous streamlined towers beneath whichmen were as tiny as ants. He loved going to drugstores and invent-ing amazing sundaes for himself (concoctions that made the later,gourmet Watts squirm at the recollection), such as "vanilla icecream globbed with butterscotch, ringed with maraschino cherries,topped with whipped cream and chopped nuts."l He liked thehuge steaks, the food in Jewish delicatessen shops, and the manykinds of exotic cooking. He was amused when he gave his namein stores and they spelled it Watz. He thought the New York girlsbeautiful and beautifully turned out, and never tired of watchingthe passing show in the streets.Apart from the joys of exploring New York, it was good to be

married, and married to Eleanor. The misery of being without asexual partner and the humiliation of trying to persuade various

unwilling girls to oblige him were things of the past. Marriage toEleanor had also had the additional bonus of taking him awayfrom the uncomfortable relationship with his mother and theburden of difficult relatives in general. As a young, attractive,moneyed couple, the Wattses found themselves part of an inter-esting social circle, constantly invited to parries, to weekends incountry houses, and to dinner parties with friends. Their friendswere musicians, painters, scientists, psychologists (the sort of peo-ple Watts was to know and enjoy for the rest of his life), whotalked of Buddhism, mysticism, Jungian analysis, and much else.Watts was already a brilliant talker who knew a great deal aboutthese subjects, and he enjoyed an instant populariry. If his rathercourtly British manner and "Brahmin" accent seemed slightlyaffected to his new audience, they nonetheless exerted a perverseattraction of their own.He was less successful as a father. It was not that he didn't like

the baby, more that he was bored by all the daily labor that wentwith her, which interested him much less than his own ideas andpursuits. In this he was aided by the mores of the time, whichdid not have high expectations of paternal involvement, especiallywhen, like the Watts couple, the parents could afford "help."Their social life was not seriously disrupted. Little Joan did, how-ever, sleep in their bedroom, and Watts seemed to enjoy what hecalled her "burbling" and "bubbling" and the way she developed"a lilting language of her own that sounded like a mixture ofHopi, Japanese and Malayan."?Ruth Everett was living next door to them, alone, since Warren

Everett was now permanently confined to a nursing home witharteriosclerosis. Pursuing her interest in Zen, she found herself in1938 a new master, Sokei-an-Sasaki. Funded by a rich Japanesebusinessman, Mr. Mia, Sokei-an had taken a couple of rooms on

74 ZEN EFFECTS The Towers of Manhattan 75West Seventy-third Street and founded the Buddhist Society ofAmerica in May 1931. "I had a house and one chair. And I hadan altar and a pebble stone," said Sokei-an, "I just came in hereand took off my hat and sat down in the chair and began to speakBuddhism. That is a11."3Sokei-an had led an adventurous and interesting life. He had

begun by studying art and becoming a painter, carver, and sculptorin Tokyo, with a particular skill in carving dragons, but he hadgone on to become a Zen student with the famous master SokatsuShaku. With Sokatsu and some of his students he had gone in1906 to California, where they tried unsuccessfully to farm atHayward near San Francisco. Sokatsu arranged a marriage forSokei-an, and he had three children by his wife, Tomoko. Much ofhis life had been one of conflict, as he was torn between first hisZen studies and his work as an artist, and then between his duty toTomoko and his children, and his longing to lead a lonely andindependent life. Eventually he separated from his wife and re-turned to Japan where his old teacher was now living; there hegave himself up at last to his Zen studies. At the age of forty-eighthe was authorized to teach by Sokatsu and told to return to theUnited States where his life's work would henceforth be. The firstyears in New York were painful, as he tried to eke out an exist-ence without money or a permanent place to live. Then Mr. Miatook him up, and slowly he began to acquire students.By 1938, when Ruth Everett met him, Sokei-an had about

thirty students who met for zazen for about half an hour. Theysat upright on chairs rather than crosslegged on the floor becauseSokei-an was convinced that Westerners would not endure thecrosslegged posture. His major teaching was not zazen - therewas no sesshin at his zendo (room for meditation) either-onlysanzen, the private interview in which koans were assigned anddiscussed.

Hearing of the remarkable Sokei-an from Ruth Everett, Wattsdecided to go along and see the master for himself. He found himin "a small temple in a walk-up ... just one large room with ashrine that could be closed off with folding doors, and a smallkitchen. Here Sakei-an lived in extreme simplicity with his Maltesecat, Chaka.:"Watts was very taken with both the simplicity and convenience

of Sokei-an's way of life and asked the old man if he could becomehis student, to which Sokei-an agreed. The method of trainingwas that the pupil was given a koan that, following the formalmethod devised by Hakuin, had to be answered in a specific way.Beginning with enormous enthusiasm, Watts worked extremely

hard at his koans, only to find that, bored and angry, he reacheda point of nearly intolerable frustration and felt as though he werelooking for a needle in a haystack. Ironically, in The Spirit of Zenhe had described this sort of discouragement as an essential stagein the pupil's development, the suffering described as an iron ballin the throat that could neither be swallowed down nor spat out.It was indeed precisely the experience of being driven "out of one'smind" and thus onto another level of awareness altogether that thekoan so uncomfortably existed to promote.Perhaps Watts did not have enough trust in Sokei-an to undergo

this ordeal at his hands, or perhaps he found the role of apprenticetoo humiliating to be bearable. Whatever the reason, after someeight or nine months of study Watts lost his temper in sanzen,shouting at his teacher that he was right."No, you're not right," Sokei-an replied. That was the end of

formal Zen study.Other pupils saw Sokei-an very differently. When he sat in the

roshi chair to conduct sanzen, the small, rather insignificant-looking man inspired awe. He was formidably silent, and thesilence created a vacuum in which the pupil was drawn out of his

ZEN EFFECTS The Towers of Manhattan 77

or her habitual self into a new awareness of the One. Ruth Everett,admittedly always deeply fascinated by Sokei-an, felt that, in histeaching guise, he was not so much a man as an "absoluteprinciple."Sokei-an liked to lecture, which he did hesitantly and with a

strong Japanese accent. His astonished audience would see himchange before their eyes, becoming the animals or the people orthe forces of nature he was describing: a golden mountain or alonely coyote, a princess or a geisha. According to one of hispupils, in Sokei-an's teaching "there was something of Kabuki,something of Noh's otherworldliness, something of a fairy storyfor children, something of archaic Japan. Yet all was as universalas the baby's first waah.,,5Either Watts did not see this or his envy of the rival spellbinder

was insupportable. It was not exactly that he had decided thatSokei-an had no more to teach him, rather that he resented theteacher/pupil role. He solved this problem through a kind ofsurreptitious observation of Sokei-an, a study of how a Zen masterlived as he went about his daily life.There was ample opportunity for him to do this, since Sokei-an

was now spending a lot of time at Ruth Everett's apartment, eatingwith her and going on trips with her, and Watts and Eleanor werefrequently invited along. "A photograph of the period shows ...Alan and Eleanor, Sokei-an and Ruth, out for the evening on theboardwalk at Atlantic City - mother and daughter looking likesisters in their long evening gowns, Watts resembling a young,handsome David Niven in his tuxedo, and Sokei-an, also in eve-ning clothes, but wearing glasses, and a large false nose and rnous-tache, looking very much like a Japanese Groucho Marx.,,6Watts's observation of Sokei-an at close quarters deepened rather

than lessened his admiration. There was something true and some-

how inexplicable about his calm, his laugh, his ribald, earthyhumor (often rather shocking to American sensibilities; he likedto use farting as an example of a spontaneous Zen moment), hisskill as a woodcarver, and his scholarship in the Buddhist classics.Watts noticed that he had none of the nervous embarrassment ofother Japanese he had known, but "moved slowly and easily, withrelaxed but complete attention to whatever was going on."?Ruth Everett's organizing energy had begun to make a differ-

ence to Sokei-an's modest beginnings of a Buddhist society. Shehad persuaded him that, Western or not, his students must sitcrosslegged on the floor, and she took on the editorship of thesociety's journal, Cat's Yawn. She and Sokei-an began working to-gether on a translation of the Sutra of Perfect Awakening.Formidable woman that Ruth was - her granddaughters point

out that she was born on Halloween, under the sign of Scorpio,and that her Japanese name meant "dragon's wisdom" - Sokei-andearly enjoyed her company a great deal.Warren Everett died in 1940. Even before his death, Watts and

Eleanor had noticed, unbelievingly at first, that Ruth and Sokei-anappeared to be falling in love. Watts had wanted to observe theconduct of a Zen master at first hand, but he had scarcely antici-pated the experience that now came to him of watching one in"the first bloom of romance." Absolute principle and dragon, thisunlikely pair seemed to match one another in power, perhaps bothfinding love for the first time in their lives, she "drawing out hisbottomless knowledge of Buddhism and he breaking down herrigidities with ribald tales that made her blush and giggle."sIn November 1941 Ruth set up a sort of house-cum-temple for

Sokei-an on East Sixty-fifth Street. Here she took her splendidlibrary and Oriental works of art and set up the First Zen Instituteof America. This was intended to be Sokei-an's future home. In

ZEN EFFECTS

I

The Towers of Manhattan 79

December, however, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, andalmost at once the FBI began rounding up Japanese, Americancitizens or not. The Buddhist Society was regarded as an objectof particular suspicion, and Ruth and Sokei-an were extensivelyquestioned.In July 1942 Sokei-an was taken to an internment camp in

Wyoming. He had just had an operation for hemorrhoids at thetime and, according to Watts, was "put in a hut from which hehad to walk some fifty muddy yards to the nearest latrine." Themajor in charge of the camp liked Sakei-an and did his best toease his living conditions, in return for which Sakei-an carved hima stick with a dragon climbing on it. Ruth hired a famous lawyerto work on his case, and eventually he was allowed to returnhome, his health seriously undermined. The couple married atlast in 1944. In 1945 Sokei-an died, according to Watts with theparting words, "Sokei-an will never die," and to Rick Fields withthe saying, "I have always taken Nature's orders, and I take themnow."

Meanwhile, the marriage of Alan and Eleanor was running intodifficulties. They were very close, too close Watts was later tothink, so that the unhappiness of one could pull the other downinto deep gloom. This might not have mattered so much but forthe fact that Eleanor was becoming seriously depressed. Maybe itwas the responsibility of having a child to care for when she wasstill very young herself, maybe it was, as Watts seemed to believe,the difficulty of living with him instead of a more conventionalhusband, maybe the sexual disagreements that were later to be-come central to their marriage were beginning to be apparent.Whatever the underlying reason, Eleanor was deeply sad. She puton a lot of weight, developed eczema and a tendency to put her

jaw out, presumably from tension, tended to drink too much, andto worry, quite unnecessarily, over money. No doubt being therich wife of an unemployed husband posed its own threats to themarriage; at one point, because she wanted to make Watts feel,as he put it, "more of a man," she handed over her considerableholdings in stock to him. They continued to live comfortably offthe dividends, supplemented with occasional handouts from Ruth.Eleanor began to have treatment from a psychiatrist friend, CharlieTaylor.Watts was deeply affected by Eleanor's distress. He entered into

her symptoms and the possible cures with the kind of friendlysympathy he always showed to those around him; it was not easyto see what was troubling her. Eleanor "had everything," as peoplesay-money, a nice apartment, an attractive husband who lovedher, and a contented baby - yet she was showing signs of severestress.Watts is oddly silent about the relationship between Eleanorand Ruth at this time.Eleanor, who had been frightened and controlled by her mother

all her life, can scarcely have wished to live next door to her inadult life, nor to have lived off her money, with all the possibiliriesfor power that such an arrangement provides. But getting out ofRuth's pocket would have required Watts to take up a successfulcareer, which he showed no sign of doing. In one sense, Watts washer ally against her mother, an attractive husband who was theo-retically on her side. But the trouble was that Watts was deeplyfascinated by her mother, perhaps even to a degree in love withher. His previous models in life had been men, rich, clever, eccen-tric figures, whose knowledge and taste exceeded his own andfrom whom he could learn. But his mother-in-law was wealthierthan Francis Croshaw, cleverer than Christmas Humphreys, betterread in the Oriental classics than Watts. Her ideas, her conversa-

tion, her library, her style, her taste ("infallible" so far as Orientalobjets d'art were concerned) all compelled him in spite of him-self. Partly it seemed that wealth had always cast the sort of spellover him that it sometimes does upon the genteelly poor; partlyperhaps, in the days of Ruth's unhappy marriage to Warren Ever-ett, Watts sensed a deep sexual frustration that attracted him morethan he knew. For all these reasons he could not be free of Ruth,and Eleanor, who despite gifts and talent of her own had neverquite emerged from the shadow of her mother, felt more trappedthan ever.

Although Watts could not see his way to taking a job, he had noneof the characteristics of the layabout or ne'er-do-well. Much as heliked parties and relaxed evenings with friends, he had a naturalself-discipline, liked to rise early and use every moment of theday. He spent his time reading seriously and deeply, working athis Zen studies, practicing photography, calligraphy, and painting_ he worked in watercolor, ink, and tempera. He also paintedicons and sometimes made erotic drawings to please his friends.Ruth suggested that he work for a Ph.D. and take up teaching, butjust as he had once felt that he could do better than go to Oxford,now he felt that he could do better for himself than take up thepatient molelike digging of the academic life. He was either tooproud or too wise, too frightened or too self-confident, too lazy ortoo easily bored - perhaps a bit of all of these.In fact, he had begun teaching, though not within the academic

system. He lectured at the Jungian Analytical Psychology Club,talking about "acceptance," in the sense of contentment, and heconducted rather successful seminars in Oriental philosophy thatwere well attended. He turned his Jungian lecture into a book-The Meaning of Happiness - which Harper enthusiastically

bought. It came out in May I940 Just as Hitler moved intoFrance and no-one wanted to read about happiness and mysticism,"though it was warmly praised by the New York Times. As a resultof the book's success, Harper began to use Watts as a manuscriptreader, and he began to sell the odd article to magazines interestedin Asian ideas and religion.The subject of the book was a simple one. Of what did human

happiness consist? The religion and psychology of both West andEast maintained that it was about union or harmony between theindividual and the principle of life itself - God, the Self, theunconscious, the inner universe. The individual, Watts thought,needed first to become aware of this, and then to recognize that heor she was, as it were, already there. Harmony was nor, in his view,achieved by tremendous efforts, but by perceiving the real state ofaffairs:

8IThe Towers of Manhattan

At this very moment we have that union and harmony in spire ofourselves; we create spiritual problems simply through not beingaware of it, and that lack of understanding causes, and in turn iscaused by, the delusion of self-sufficiency.As Christianity wouldsay, the Grace of God is always being freely offered; the problemis to get man to accept it and give up the conceit that he can savehimself by the power of his ego, which is like trying to pick himselfup by his own belr."

This idea that we are already there was to be central to allWatts's thinking thereafter. It had practical consequences for hisdaily life, in particular that he was unable to follow "systems," ashe had been unable to accept the teaching of Sokei-an. Similarly,he was fascinated by depth psychology, but unable to undertakethe discipline of psychoanalysis.The purpose of all disciplines for the mind, it seemed to him,

whether religious or psychological, was enlightenment, mystical

ZEN EFFECTS80

ZEN EFFECTS

experience, "transforming consciousness so as to see clearly thatthe separate and alienated ego is an illusion distracting us fromknowing that there is no self other than the eternal ground ofbeing.'?"What he had against the systems, however, was that they subtly

encouraged the disciples to postpone enlightenment to some futurein which they were "good enough." A system, it seemed to thissupremely confident young man, might be

an elaborate and subtle ego-trip in which people inflate their egosby trying to destroy them, stressing the superhuman difficulry ofthe task. It can so easily be mere postponement of realization to thetomorrow which never comes, with the mock humiliry of, "I'm notready yet. I don't deserve it." ... But what if this is just self-punish-ment and spirirual masochism-lying, as it were, on a bed of nailsto assure oneself of "authentic" existence? Mortification of the egois an attempt to get rid of what doesn't exist, or - which comes tothe same thing - of the feeling that it exists.... My point was,and has continued to be, that the Big Realization for which allthese systems strive is not a furure attainment but a present fact,that this now-moment is eternity, and that one must see it now ornever.11

This idea followed very naturally from the Zen leap, the "directpath up the mountainside," which he had written about in TheSpirit of Zen. He was older now, however, and his students andcontemporaries in the United States were harder on him than theBuddhist Lodge had been on the twenty-year-old boy. At his age,they wondered, what did he know of wisdom, of suffering, ofmystical experience? Where was his apprenticeship to a guru, hisinitiation, his gradual growth into God-consciousness? Wisdomdemanded that the disciple work away faithfully until crisispoint or breakdown was reached, and in that crisis grasp the truth;

•" The Towers of Manhattan

the Buddha himself had followed the pattern. Yet here was youngAlan Watts claiming that you could get there without the agony,that you could fly in by airplane, as it were, instead of making thelong, painful journey by foot and camel. Who did he think he was?Close to the question of whether or not discipleship was neces-

sary was another conundrum about religion which Watts set out inan article for the Columbia Review of Religion.!2 His thinkingabout whether one attained mystical experience through a supremeeffort of will, or whether the effort was precisely what preventedone from having the experience, reminded him of the ancientChristian dispute between Pelagius and Saint Augustine. Pelagiusheld that man's salvation must come by his own efforts, and SaintAugustine that it could only come by way of divine gift or "grace."Prompted by Suzuki, Watts had long ago noticed that MahayanaBuddhism struggled with a very similar conflict. There were those,such as the Zen meditators, who pinned their hopes of liberationon jiriki (self-power, the effect of one's own dutiful efforts towardsenlightenment), and those, like the Jodo Shinshu sect (Pure LandBuddhists), who believed that liberation can only come by tariki(other power), the power of Amidha or Amitabha, a transcen-dental form of the Buddha revered in Southeast Asia. As Wattstoiled at these ideas for his Review article it began to occur to himthat Zen, Jodo Shinshu, and Christianity might all three be ap-proaching the same goal (enlightenment) by different routes.With growing excitement he began to see Christianity as part ofthe common experience of the human race, instead of a religion hefound embarrassingly and uncomfortably unique. If Christianscould be persuaded to give up their rigid, defensive stance, their"imperialistic claims to be the one true and perfect revelation,"then there might be a chance to rediscover Christianity's mysticaldepths and, for many Westerners who had never seriously con-

ZEN EFFECTS

sidered it, to discover it for the first time. He also thought that itmight be possible for a growing number of people to get into thehabit of "passing over" from one religion to another in search ofwhatever sustenance they needed.It is impossible to divorce these intellectual struggles of Watts

from his emotional conflicts. Throughout his life Watts seemed toneed to reconcile his childhood religion with his adopted religion.He had taken in Christianity with his mother's milk, but haddigested it uneasily, as Emily had before him. He had longed tofind it better than it was, even, perhaps, as he had longed to findEmily tenderer and prettier than she was.To accept spiritual guidance from a teacher was to put himself

back in a state of dependence, and there was in him a mixture oflonging and fear, of self-destructive willfulness and calculatedself-interest, which made it too difficult to accept help, evenfrom a Sokei-an. He had to be independent and self-sufficient be-cause any kind of dependence brought back the guilt and shameof dependence upon Emily. It seemed to be what mothers, evenwhen disguised as Zen monks, exacted as the price of suchnourishment.It was of course true that many adults made themselves ridic-

ulously dependent upon priests, rosbi, gurus, and other kinds ofteachers, and it was equally true that sometimes in their depend-ence they believed nonsense that no intelligent person should be-lieve and submitted to all sorts of practices and disciplines that atbest were harmless and at worst actually got in the way of realunderstanding and insight. Often they had little or nothing to dowith the inner leap of Zen, or liberation in any of its Western orEastern forms.That is not to say, however, that there were no masters from

whom Watts could benefit. Indeed, as a young man he clearly

The Towers of Manhattan

longed to find a teacher he could depend upon, and he turned,with varying degrees of success, to Toby Humphreys, Ruth FullerSasaki, Sokei-an Sasaki, and possibly D. T. Suzuki, as later in lifehe would try to trust a psychoanalyst. But in the end his nerve al-ways failed, and he had to detach himself as he had from Sokei-an.To refuse so much wisdom and loving care, however skillfully herationalized it, reduced him to an isolation, which, for all hismarvellous openness, produced a particular kind of rigidity, therigidity that comes from self-sufficiency, from always "knowingbetter." It was a lonely path to have chosen.

It was all the lonelier since Eleanor's neurotic problems weregrowing worse. The jolly girl who had once taught him to dancethe hula had turned into a sad woman who felt too miserable tocope with life at all. One day, wandering into Saint Patrick'sCathedral when she felt tired on a shopping expedition, Eleanorhad a vision of Christ. It filled her with deep disquiet, and shebegan a round of visits to priests and others who might tell herwhat it meant. No one seemed able to do this in a way that shefound helpful.Given the closeness of Watts and Eleanor at that time, it is

perhaps not very surprising that Eleanor somehow anticipated hisrevived interest in Christianity. From the time of his Reviewarticle onwards, Watts had been taken up with the idea of a workof resuscitation. What had repeatedly shocked him was the sensethat few Christians really knew or cared about the "innerness" oftheir religion. Most knew much about the basic teachings andpractices of Christianity, but had no conception of the mysticalContent that Watts felt gave the religion vitality and meaning. Hewanted both to revive the lost mystical tradition of Christianityand to integrate Christianity among the great religions of the

86 ZEN EFFECTS The Towers of Manhattan

world. For Watts it had a place, but not, as Westerners oftenbelieved, the sale place.This was an exciting if ambitious plan for which it is possible

to feel some sympathy - an attempt at healing the great divideof East and West, as well as, maybe, the great divide within AlanWatts. It was one of many ways in which he was ahead of his time,anticipating ideas that would not truly come into their own foranother twenty years.This was not enough for him, however. He at once moved on

from this position in his thinking to wonder whether, if he wasto be listened to in his criticisms of Christianity, he should find astronger strategic position from which to do it. As he put it, hebegan to think that the best thing would be to "fit myself into theWestern design of life by taking the role of a Christian minisrer.T'"However generously Watts's motives are interpreted, it is diffi-

cult not to feel a twinge of cynicism about this scheme. A youngman who has been a Buddhist for the past ten years of his lifesuddenly decides to become a Christian priest, not from any suddenconviction that Christianity is the "way of liberation," but because,to put it bluntly, it provides a convenient way of earning a living.Unemployed, tired of living off his wife and his wife's relatives,knowing that he knows a great deal about religion, and that he isa natural speaker, singer, and theologian (much more skillful atall these things than the average parish priest), he adds all ofthese considerations together and decides that switching religionsmay be the answer.Watts did not, in fact, make any pretence of conversion, but

such was the enthusiasm of the Christian clergy who encouragedhim, or such was the unconscious arrogance in the church that all"right-thinking" people are Christian at heart, that he encounteredno difficulties when he proposed to take up paid employment in

a religion no longer his own. Such criticism as there was came notfrom Christians, but from his friends and students.

Our personal friends . . . were astonished. They knew Eleanor asan earthy girl with a rich belly-laugh, and me as a fathomlesssource of bawdy limericks with a propensity for outlandish dancingand the kind of chanting which, today, brings calls to the police,the citizens supposing that the Apaches- in full war paint - arein their midst. The . . . possibility of such persons being also aminister and a minister's wife was beyond belief. Were we about torepent our sins and become godly, righteous and soberr"

Eugene Exman, the religious editor at Harper, apparently think-ing that it was faith rather than a paid job that was the issue,urged him to become a Quaker. Watts's students, not unreason-ably, had mixed feelings.

I had discussedBuddhism as a key to the inner meaning of Chris-tianity in seminars,and many of them, especiallythose with Jungianinclinations, had no difficulty in seeing Christian symbols as arche-types of the collective unconscious which is common to mankindas a whole. Others felt instinctivelyuncomfortable with Christianityfor, although they could grasp the rationale of my explanations,they could not stand the atmosphere of church and churchy people.!"

Ruth took the line of "how nice that you dear children have atleast found a belief that really means something for you."!" It wasa subtle insult, implying that Buddhism had not really meant verymuch to Watts, and it is difficult to see how she could regard thechange with much admiration.The most quizzical response came from Robert Hurne, Indolo-

gist and translator of the Upanishads, who taught at Union Theo-logical Seminary; alone of Watts's friends he questioned theintegrity of what was going on. Watts reports his attitude ratherSCornfully: "How very interesting, how really remarkable that I

- Alan Watts - should be contemplating this momentousSTEP. He would be fascinated to know in just what ways I hadcome to feel that Buddhism was insufficient.'?"Watts's daughter Joan suggests another reason for Alan's "con-

version." In 1941 he was in danger of being drafted, and havingescaped the war in England he did not propose to have it catchup with him in the United States. As a minister he would be safefrom the draft, although it is not a reason he mentions in hisautobiography.With their new plan in mind Watts and Eleanor began shop-

ping around the Episcopal churches in New York. The lowchurches, which offered simple morning prayer, clearly would notdo for such a ritualist as Watts, but on Palm Sunday they discov-ered Saint Mary the Virgin on West Forty-sixth Street. Afterattending the blessing of the palms and solemn high mass, allcarried out in Gregorian chant, they realized that they had foundtheir new home. They returned for Tenebrae on Maundy Thursday.First there was a prolonged chanting of psalms, interspersed withbits of Palestrina. "One by one they extinguished the candles ona stand before the altar and gradually the church went into dark-ness.... There was undoubtedly magic in that church.t"Watts introduced himself to Fr. Grieg Taber, the rector of Saint

Mary's, and told him about his wish to become a priest. It is notrecorded that Father Taber had any doubts on the subject. Wasthis because Watts was so plausible, because he really seemed tohave the makings of a priest, or because Father Taber was notaccustomed to men approaching the idea with quite so much coolcalculation as Watts did?Pages of slightly uneasy explanation and justification are given

in the autobiography. Watts had not abandoned Buddhism andTaoism, in fact he had always thought the Gospels inferior to the

88 ZEN EFFECTS The Towers of Manhattan

Tao te Ching. But perhaps it did not matter all that much if hewas not very interested in Jesus. What mattered when celebratingmass was conveying the mystery, the mystery that all religionscelebrated. He could really do a great service to people by sug-gesting that "Christianity might be understood as a form of thatmystical and perennial philosophy which has appeared in almostall times and places.t'" As a priest he would be "sincere but notserious."The excuses and explanations multiply, but never do they seem

to justify such a significant change. What seems to be lacking isany sense of passion, or, as the Christians say, vocation. Becominga priest for Watts was, in the main, a way of making a career outof religion. An incidental inconvenience was that it also impliedsome degree of disloyalty to the Buddhist beliefs he had practicedand advocated for years. There is a deep and disturbing sense ofhis refusal to face the implications of what he did, and underlyingthat, an unattractive self-seeking. Becoming a priest would solvesome urgent problems in his life. His final word on the subject isa chillingly practical comment on his defection from Buddhismand his sudden espousal of a religion he had affected to despise:"It was simply that the Anglican Communion seemed to be themost appropriate context for doing what was in me to do, inWestern Sociery.'?"

Father Taber sent Watts to see Dean Fosbrooke at the GeneralTheological Seminary, and Fosbrooke pointed out his lack of adegree. What a young man like him needed was some academicbackground, more particularly in history. One way to get into thepriesthood without a college degree was to find a bishop who wasfavorably impressed, and then, with his sponsorship and approval,it was occasionally possible to make a short cut in the academic

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training. Wallace Conkling, the bishop of Chicago, seemed a likelysponsor, since he was just the sort of Anglo-Catholic Watts aspiredto become. And the Everetts, though far from keen churchgoers,were a well-known family in Evanston, with many of the rightconnections necessary in just this sort of situation.All went as planned. The bishop took to Watts, and Watts,

rather unexpectedly, took to the bishop, deciding he was a bhaktimystic (one who achieved enlightenment through devotion) anda man of high culture. Watts was at once sent off to talk to BishopMcElwain, the dean of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary inEvanston, who felt that the degree might possibly be overlookedand that Watts might be enrolled as a special student, if he couldshow that he had read reasonably widely in religion and history.The reading list that Watts then prepared astounded the old man,accustomed as he was to less scholarly students. The bishop pre-scribed a two-year course for Watts, with courses in New Testa-ment Greek, the Old Testament, and theology.The young couple cheerfully packed up their possessions in

New York, pausing only for Watts to paint a mural of the tree oflife in the white space on the wall left by taking down a Japanesescreen. They moved to Clinton Place in Evanston, next door to aflautist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who introduced Wattsto the delights of poker, usually played with other members of theorchestra. The new milieu was suburban, and, determined to livelike his neighbors, Watts bought insurance, went to football games,and attended church socials and dances, though with a playfulspirit that indicated a certain lack of conviction. The chameleonhad entered a new phase.

Five

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AFTER THE MYSTERYAND NUMINOUSNESS of Saint Marythe Virgin, the churches of Chicago struck the Wattses as ratherarid. The seminary chapel at Seabury-Western did not appeal toAlan Watts much either: "a colorless alley lined with oak choirstalls where the black-gowned seminarists sat in somber rows tochant the psalms of Matins and Evensong.'"Nor were his Evanston neighbors all that much to his taste.

The main preoccupation of most of them was making money,which Watts thought might be rather fun to do - a clever game,like bridge - only people seemed to have to pretend not toenjoy it.

It must most definitelybe classifiedaswork; as that which you haveto do as a duty to your family and community, and which thereforeaffordsmany businessmenthe best possible excuse for staying awayfrom home and from their wives. The Nemesis of this attitude isthat it flows over into the so-called leisure or non-work areas oflife in such a way that playing with children, giving attention toone's wife, exercising on the golf course, and purchasing certain

This veryeatth is the Pure Land,And this verybody the Bodyof Buddha!

At home at Clinton Place Watts and Eleanor had done what theycould to make a rented house feel homey. When they arrived itwas all painted institutional buff, expensively antiqued on the

Somewhere in all this Watts became fascinated by the "un-knowing" tradition of Christian mysticism, as in The Cloud ofUnknowing: "silence of the mind and being simply at the disposalof God without holding any image or concept of God.?" It washere, Watts felt, that Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism cameclose to touching hands.A chance encounter during this period was with Aldous Huxley.

On an Easter visit to Ruth in New York in 1943 Watts was intro-duced to Huxley, and they both made tentative overtures in whatwas to be a long, though not close, friendship. Watts found Huxleykind and sensitive, as well as mordantly witty and intellectual. Itwas a pleasure for Watts to hear again rhe forgotten cadences ofEnglish beautifully phrased and spoken by an English voice.Huxley told him about the group of Englishmen - Gerald Heard,Christopher Isherwood, Felix Greene, and himself, all living onthe West Coast - that was studying Vedanrist ideas. Heard andHuxley in particular were working towards some sort of synthesisof Christianity and Oriental mysticism, but in Huxley's excellentexposition of it at least, it came across as too "spiritual," tooascetic. Huxley seemed to Watts a Manichaean who hated thebody. Watts's own thoughts along these lines were that Christian-ity's "Word made flesh" must be about a transcendence of thedualism of mind and matter rather than a denial of the flesh, andit seemed to him that this expressed much the same idea as PureLand Buddhism.

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luxuries also becomeduties. Survival itself becomesa duty and evena drag, for the pretense of not enjoying the games gets under theskin and tightens the muscles which repress joyous and sensuousemorion.f

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Watts clearly was still struggling with his own Protestant roots,using his resentment of them to make observations about thelink between work and play.For him the barrier berween work and play did not exist. At

Seabury-Western Watts threw himself into reading with a tre-mendous intellectual appetite. He had been afraid at first that hewould have difficulty in keeping up, since unlike most of hisfellow students he had not been to college, but his old Brahmintraining and his habits of scholarship stood him in good stead.He quickly discovered that his rusty Greek was the best in theclass, and that he could manage all the required reading by work-ing one night a week, which left the rest of his study periods freefor the reading that interested him. By his second year he was sofar ahead that his teachers excused him from classwork and taughthim on a tutorial basis. So it came about that for two years Wartsgave himself up to serious theological reading, day after day, thestudy of a man who cared intensely about theological ideas andhad a boundless curiosity about what others had made of thoseideas. He read Harnack's History of Dogma, Clement and Origen,the Gnostics, Athanasius, Irenaeus. There was one period whenhe threw himself into reading Saint Thomas Aquinas and hismodern exponents, Maritain and Gilson. There was a Russianphase when he read Vladimir Soloviev, Berdyaev, the hesychasts.He intensely scrutinized the classics of Christian mysticism-every well-known mystic from Pseudo-Dionysius to Leon Bloy,together with Evelyn Underhill, Friedrich von Hugel, and DamJohn Chapman.

moldings. They painted it, moldings and all, in pale green. Theywere living in a style unimaginable for most students and enjoyedthe services of a maid.Eleanor's depression had not notably improved, however. She

found it difficult to cope with the demands of a small child, andsometimes turned violently on Joan. She was aware of the popu-larity her husband found wherever he went, and although she wascapable of holding her own socially, she felt left out and envious.All these problems were aggravated by the fact that, soon afterthey arrived at Evanston, she found herself pregnant once more.She did not want another child yet, but consoled herself with thethought that it might be a son, which she did want. In August194 2 , however, she gave birth to a daughter, Ann (often, as ayoung child, to be called Winkie). Eleanor was disappointed andinclined to blame Watts for her plight. Ann had come into apainful inheritance - a mother who did not want children andwho would have preferred a boy, and a father who, both sisterswere later to feel, really preferred Joan. From quite early on, un-able to cope with all the tensions of her family life, Eleanor wasphysically cruel to Ann.Watts's response to Eleanor's growing misery and to the distress

of the children was to withdraw still further into his academicwork. No doubt he had once thought he could save Eleanor fromher various problems, including her mother; now he began to feelher as a drag on his life, and her mother, who had interested himso much, was far away in New York. Eleanor fought with himor had long bouts of crying; she was less and less interested in thesexual side of the marriage. She rebuked Watts continually for notgiving enough of his time to the children, and Joan remembersthe frequency of rows at Clinton Place.Watts did not spend much time with his children (either in this

Perhaps Watts's children did not so much find him distant andaloof in any emotional sense, as simply not there, in the most

marriage or his subsequent one), but this made the time that hedid spend with them especially treasured and memorable. On onewonderful weekend, Joan remembers, he set himself to paint theinside of the barn with monsters and demons until he had trans-formed it into a place of magic. When Watts played with hischildren he played as if he was a child himself, totally absorbed.He wasn't there a lot, but the time he gave was, says Joan,"quality time."A few years later Ann found herself sick in the hospital with

scarlet fever. Using his position as a minister to get to see her,Watts sat down and produced on the spot a magical chain of cut-out paper dolls. He had the sorcerer's gift of producing somethingout of nothing, a gift that his children loved and remembered.Writing about his children years later Watts had his own sort ofguilt about neglecting them, and his own excuse.

By all the standards of this society I have been a terrible father,with a few disastrous attempts to be a "good" one, for the simplereason that I have no patience with the abstract notion of "thechild," which our culture imposes on small people; with the toysand games they are supposed to enjoy, with the books they aresupposed to read, with the mannerisms they're supposed to assume,and with the schools in which they become lowest-common-denominator images of each other. I am completely at ease withthe infant who still enjoys nonsense and plays spontaneously at un-programmed games, and then again with the adolescent who iscalling the brainwashing into question. But the Disneyland "worldof childhood" is an itsy-bitsy, cutie-pied, plastic hoax; a world pop-ulated by frustrated brats trying to make out why they are nottreated as human beings.... If my children have found me distantand aloof, this is the explanation."

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ordinary physical sense, to which Disney and his artefacts wereirrelevant. They needed their father to counter Eleanor's sadnessand to control her anger against them, and he was too busybecoming an Episcopalian.

It was not easy for someone who was still basically a Buddhist topass as a man of Christian conviction. The need for an element ofconcealment was there, since Watts was exasperated at beingconstantly in the company of those whose emotions were "coloredChristian." He detested the atmosphere of guilt, repentance, andconfession, and hated the idea of God as He. She might havecorrected the balance a bit, he felt, but really if he was to speakof God at all (and he found it difficult to take that idea seriously) ,he would have preferred to use the word It or That.His Christian teachers for their part accused Watts of pantheism

and wondered if his inability to relate to God as a person mightindicate an inability to relate to persons in general. This was afairly offensive observation, but no doubt they sensed that some-thing was not quite right about Watts's sense of vocation and thathe was holding back feelings and thoughts from those who weresupposed to be friends and future colleagues.Watts describes this period of his life in mock-innocent, "Where

did I go wrong?" tones: "I chose priesthood because it was theonly formal role of Western society into which, at that time, Icould even begin to fit. ... But it was an ill-fitting suit of clothes,not only for a shaman but also for a bohemian - that is, one wholoves color and exuberance, keeps irregular hours, would ratherbe free than rich, dislikes working for a boss, and has his owncode of sexual rnorals.:" To which the Christians might havereplied, if they had understood his rather dubious motives, thatno one was compelling him to be a priest.However, on Ascension Day 1944 Watts was ordained an

97Episcopal priest in the Church of the Atonement, Evanston (hemanaged to get the date wrong in his autobiography); he hadput on the ill-fitting suit of clothes and was condemned to wearthem for another six years.He could not imagine himself as a parish priest and hoped that

Bishop Conkling might let him be a sort of priest-at-large inChicago, maybe running a retreat house with a strong emphasison contemplative prayer. Much later, by the 1960s and 1970s,Christians were to develop a renewed interest in contemplativeprayer, but Watts was ahead of this development. The best thechurch could do for him was to make him chaplain at North-western University.Watts threw himself into the job with a will. It provided a

home for his family at Canterbury House on Sheridan Road inEvanston. Canterbury House was designed to be both the chap-lain's home and a sort of student center, and it contained within itSaint Thomas's Chapel. Eleanor, who had skill and taste, set towork to give the house a welcoming beauty and style.Watts meanwhile worked out a program to attract students

both to services and to the intensive course of education and dis-cussion in which he wanted to involve them. In one of thepamphlets he had printed for students, he pointed out that at themost, a high school graduate had had 360 hours of religiousinstruction in school as compared with 1,800 hours of Englishor mathematics. That meant that a grown-up girl or boy hadabout reached the third grade where religious teaching was con-cerned. One of his hopes was to encourage intellectual curiosityabout religion.

The Church is here on campus to provide what college educationneglects- a mature understanding of those doctrines and the realanswer of Christian philosophy to the central problems of life, inignorance of which rio-one can call himself educated....

materialism so fashionable among modern educators; and to affordyou the opportunity to bring your own faith in God and his Churchto maturity and conviction.Although it is not an organized social center, Canterbury House

is "Open House," especially on Sunday afternoons from 4 to 6.People are always coming in to talk and pass the time of day; theChaplain thoroughly enjoys it; you cannot waste his time!8

This was an enthusiastic and generous approach to a job forwhich Watts was paid a tiny salary, It was difficult for Eleanorand the children to carryon their family life with such busycoming and going of students, but Eleanor was determined to playthe part of "the minister's wife" to the best of her ability. Wattssoon became a well-known figure on campus, bicycling from oneplace to another (bicycling was rare enough at that time to beregarded as eccentric), dressed from head to toe in clerical black.He was bearded too, which was unusual, and it was rumored thathe fasted and went in for other ascetic practices.

Fired by the intensive reading of the past few years, Watts hadbegun a new book entitled Behold the Spirit: A Study in theNecessity of Mystical Religion, for which his seminary was toaward him a master's degree. In the course of his switch to formalChristianity, which the book represents, he enormously increasedhis theological knowledge. The intensive course of reading thatpreceded his ordination introduced him to the Fathers, to theSumma Theologica, to the riches of medieval Christianity, and tothe Counter Reformation saints, all of which subjects were pre-viously unknown to him. He began to realize that there was moreto his native religion than Protestant ethics, guilt, and sentimentaldevotions to Jesus. Fired by this discovery he recovered the clarityand energy of style evident in his early books about Zen.

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Canterbury House is not a "social center." It has no "organizations,"no "committees," no "programs." It is supported by the EpiscopalDiocese of Chicago to serve the spiritual life of Northwestern Uni-versity, to give proofs of God's existence, his supreme importanceand our utter dependence upon him, and of the impossibility ofrational life and thought without him; to combat the silly andpernicious views of agnosticism, humanism and pseudo-scientific

What am I for? What causes me to exist? Is it a mechanicalprocess or a living intelligence? What is God, the ultimate life andreality? Can I have actual knowledge of God, and if so how? Thesemost fascinating of all questions are in the mind of every memberof this university, for even the most hard-boiled agnostic has someinterest in religion.Through lack of time and resources the religious teaching given

in the average Sunday School (or even sermon) is so elementaryand superficial as to be actually misleading to a grown mind. Thusthe popular impression of Christian doctrine is a wild caricature ofthe reality. No wonder people don't believe it!7

The pamphlet that offered this release from religious ignoranceadvertised a series of lectures at 7: 30 on Sunday evenings, manyof them given by Watts himself, on such subjects as "Religion andScience," "Christianity and Psychoanalysis," "Popular ReligiousArt" (with slides for illustration) , and "The Painting of Eternity"(also with slides). It also offered individual instruction with thechaplain for any member of the university who cared to ask for it.Individual instruction would cover the following subjects: the aimof religion; the doctrine of God; the doctrine of man; the Incarna-tion; the Church and sacraments; prayer and the spiritual life;Christian ethics; Christian worship.In addition to this educational program Watts also offered

personal counseling to those who wanted it, and he made it clearthat he and Canterbury House were always available:

The main trouble with church religion, Watts says, is thatpeople are taught to carry out spiritual exercises on a sort ofimitative basis. Because the saints said their prayers, received thesacraments, and performed the conventional Christian gestures,others suppose that the way to become saints is to copy them, andif no inner transformation takes place, they are enjoined to prac-tice "holy patience" forever if necessary. But this approach does not

Christian faith and practice have lost force because the enormousmajority of Christians ... do not know what they mean. Let it besaid at once that such knowledge is not a matter of mere learning,of philosophical and theological acumen. Indeed, the theologianhas often just as little grasp of the meaning of his religion as any-one else. He knows ideas; he knows the relations between theseideas; he knows the historical events - the story of Christ - uponwhich these ideas are based. He knows the doctrines of the Trinity,the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, and the Atonement and can de-scribe them with accuracy. But because he does not know, or evenapprehend, what they mean, having no consciousness of unionGod, his description of them - while correct as far as it goes - IS

uninformative and lacking in significance.'?

Like all Watts's books Behold the Spirit asks how liberation, orenlightenment, is to be achieved. The book begins from the as-sumption that "Church religion is spiritually dead," as evidenced byits organizational busyness, inadequate teaching, excessive moral-ism doctrinal obscurantism, lack of conviction, absence of reality,,and disunity. What the Church did not succeed in doing was inrelating "man to the root and ground of reality and life .... Attimes man knows his need of religion; at others he only feels it asan unexplained void in the heart.I"The problem seemed to be as great among those who went to

church and followed Christian spiritual disciplines as among thosewho had abandoned or never known such practices.

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Knowledge of God, the realization of one's union with God, in aword, mysticism, is necessary.It is not simply the flower of religion;it is the very seed, lying in the flower as its fulfilment and preced-ing the root as its origin .... It is the sine qua non - the must-the first and great commandment. "Thou shalt love the Lord thyGod with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thymind." On this hangs all the Law. On this all rules and techniquesdepend, and apart from it mean norhing.P

For Watts it came down to this:

They do not know that the Church has in its possession, under lockand key (or maybe the sheer weight of persons sitting on the lid),the purest gold of mystical religion. Still less do they know rhatcreed and sacrament are only fully intelligible in terms of mysticallife. And they do not know these things because the stewards andteachers of the Church do not, for the most part, know them either.For while holding officially that eternal life consists in the knowl-edge of God - and in nothing else - churches of every kind areconcerned with almost everything but the knowledge of God.12

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take account of the terrible vacuum at the heart of such piety.Imitation does not feed spiritual hunger. "They want God himself,by whatever name he may be called; they want to be filled withhis creative life and power; they want some conscious experienceof being at one with Reality itself, so that their otherwise meaning-less and ephemeral lives may acquire an eternal significance."!'Watts suggests that such wistful seekers are ignorant of a vital

secret:

To suggest that people must know God is to say something atonce too difficult and too simple to be grasped. Mysticism is norso much a doing as an undoing, a removing of the barriers, a takingdown of the defenses, a creating of space, a getting out of the way.Mysticism is "an action in the passive."

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The time had come, Watts suggested, to recover the deepmystical sense Christianity had previously known, but with a newemphasis. Medieval Christians had felt at one with God and withreligious symbolism in a primitive, childlike way. The Renaissanceand the growth of humanism could be seen as a kind of rebelliousadolescence, necessary as a movement towards maturity, but notmaturity itself. This was followed by a tremendous awareness ofhuman power in action, in science and technology. But this enor-mous upsurge of energy and action was followed not just by weari-ness, but by the spiritual maturity of age.Following Oswald Spengler Watts suggests that Western cul-

ture was on the verge of a "Second Religiousness" that in someways would be quite different. It would be "an interior, spiritualand mystical understanding of the old, traditional body of wisdom.... What the child understood as an external, objective, andsymbolic fact, the mature mind will see also as an interior, subjec-tive, and mystical truth. What the child received on another'sauthority, the adult will know as his own inner experience.t'"Watts goes on to consider what a twentieth-century mysticism

could be like. In the past Christian mysticism had had a kind of"unholy alliance" with Manichaeism, denying the fleshliness pro-claimed in the Incarnation, "the Word made flesh," by despisingthe body - supposing it, its senses, and in particular its sexualfulfillment, to be inimical to the life of the spirit. A true under-standing of the Incarnation involves a recognition of the redemp-tion of body as well as spirit, that "the eternal life of God is givento man here and now in the flesh of each moment's experience."Release from our own isolating egoism comes partly from

recognizing the hunger for God, partly from a SOrtof relaxation.Egoism itself is "like trying to swim without relying on the water,endeavoring to keep afloat by tugging at your own legs; yourwhole body becomes tense, and you sink like a stone. Swimming

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requires a certain relaxation, a certain giving of yourself to thewater, and similarly spiritual life demands a relaxation of the soulto God,"15

Union is often thought of as a tremendous attainment, needinghuge struggles. But there is a whole other method, as in Zensatori,which suggests that what knowing God is about is not effortand attainment, but realization: "The soul striving to attain thedivine state by its own efforts falls into total despair, and suddenlythere dawns upon it with a great illuminative shock the realizationthat the divine state simply IS, here and now, and does not haveto be arrained.?'"Yet there was, Watts suggested, some perverse determination in

us that it had to be difficult, some self-regarding romantic pictureof our own heroic labors: "We flatter ourselves in premeditatingthe long, long journey we are going to take in order to find him,the giddy heights of spiritual progress we are going to scale," Thetragedy is that we thus miss the obvious:

God is not niggardly in his self-revelation; he creates us to knowhim, and short of actual compulsion does everything possible topresent himself to our consciousness.In saying that God gives usunion with himself here and now, we are saying also that here andnow he exposeshimself right before our eyes.In this very momentwe are looking straight at God, and he is so clear that for us com-plex human beings he is peculiarly hard to see. To know him wehave to simplify ourselves.!"

Watts makes the very interesting suggestion that the mysticalconsciousness of God (as opposed to the more direct, beatificVision) may be very like the sort of awareness we have of our-selves:

For while we cannot perceive our own egos directly, we know thatwe exist. We do not know what we are, bur we know ourselves asexisting, and this knowledge is present as an undertone in all other

knowledge. Similarly, the mystical knowledge of God is a knowl-edge of God in the act of his presence and union with us, but isnot immediate vision and apprehension of the divine essence.!"

The amazing joy of this sort of apprehension, partial as it is, isthat we know ourselves to be part of a "living mystery, whichimparts life, power and joy." The price of knowing this mysteryis the cutting off of the "possessive will."Always practical about spirituality, Watts goes on to consider

what this view of God means. He is not against formal religion.For some it is a necessary way to discover ultimately that Godcannot be possessed. For others it is a precious way of tracing outthe symbolic and ana logic patterns of God in order to move on to"the Reality beyond symbols." For others again, formal religionhas such repugnant associations that it is almost impossible forthem to espouse it.Watts envisages a new flexibility in Christian worship, with a

formal liturgy at one end of the scale for those who want it, andwordless contemplation at the other for those who want that.Sermonizing, moralizing (especially where the dubious lever ofguilt is employed), and excessive theological speculation, seem toWatts totally fruitless. What the whole religious endeavor is aboutis in finding God in the most hundrum moments - this, hebelieves, rather than by "devotions" to Jesus, is the way to discover"the mind of Christ." He would like to see the Church give in-formal teaching on "digging potatoes, washing dishes and workingin an office."There must, he thinks, be a Christian way of washingyour hands.This is an interesting view of Christianity, obviously much in-

fluenced by Zen. In his perception of people's hunger for mysticalexperience Watts anticipated much that was to come within thenext thirty years - the search for mystical experience outside the

104 ZEN EFFECTS Colored Christian

Church and the renewed interest in contemplative prayer within it.In other ways, too, he was prophetic. He saw that the time wascoming when the "male God" would seem incongruous, and thatthe elevation of the Virgin Mary, though important, did not touchthe real need. He saw the need for Christians to undo their Mani-chaean heritage and finally accept the messy body, able to feel atone with God even when, or especially when, in flagrante delicto.

When Behold the Spirit came out in 1947 the reviewers wererapturous. An Episcopal reviewer, Canon Iddings Bell, said thatthe book would "prove to be one of the half dozen most significantbooks on religion published in the twentieth century," which washigh praise indeed. Another Catholic author noted with interestthat the book recognized "contributions from Oriental religionwhich simply are not present in contemporary Western religion.More than this it shows how the traditional Western doctrine ofthe Incarnation and the Atonement can be reconciled with andcombined with the intuitive religion of the Orient, such as that ofZen Buddhism. These are exceedingly important and outstandingachievements." 19Meanwhile Watts was setting to work to transform the liturgical

experience of students. On Sundays at I I : 00 A.M. he conducted aservice at the Chapel of Saint John the Divine on Haven Street,which, though it stuck basically to the Book of Common Prayer,managed to achieve colorful and dramatic effects unknown to theEpiscopal students before. He introduced incense, the slow, casuallyformal processions that he had learned about from Hewlett John-son, short arresting sermons, Gregorian chant and Renaissancepolyphony, sung by a specially trained ensemble from the musicschool. Worshippers came into a church fragrant with smoke,brilliant with vestments and candles, in which the prayers were

spoken in Watts's beautiful resonant English and the ritual wasperformed like the gestures of a play. Something of the mysterythat Watts had learned from Friar Taber was there too andsomething of his own feeling for language and use of intelligenceand humor. The students began to flock to Saint John's in largenumbers, even though lively liturgy and strong preaching was onoffer in the neighborhood of the campus. Watts was one of thelatest fashions.He was also hardworking. In the Anglo-Catholic style he

celebrated Mass every morning except Mondays at 7: I 5 A.M. inSaint Thomas's Chapel, and most of the rest of his waking hourswere spent either conducting services, taking seminars, or enter-taining students in his own home.His growing popularity was looked upon a little sourly and

suspiciously by colleagues and others. The dean of the seminarywondered aloud what sort of preparation Watts s example wouldprovide for the work his theological students would be taking upin very ordinary parishes where the "bells and smells" of SaintJohn's would not be appreciated. The mother of one of theseminarians quoted in Watts's biography expressed this point ofview more succinctly: "The religion you are giving these people isnot the religion of Saint Luke's and Saint Mark's here in town,and from what I can see it isn't the religion of the EpiscopalChurch anywhere.'?" Perhaps she sensed an element almost of leg-pulling in the sheer elaboration of ceremonies; she had, at least,an inkling that Watts was up to something. He had also managedto upset the scientists on the faculty of Northwestern by attackingtheir antireligious attitudes.The students, not surprisingly, took a more adventurous view

of his activities. His imaginative liturgies appealed to many ofthem. They dubbed Richard Adams, a student with whom Alan

planned the liturgies, "the Sorcerer's apprentice," a joking recogni-tion of the shaman quality they noted in Watts. They appreciatedthe individual attention Watts was prepared to give to people inintellectual or emotional difficulties, and they enjoyed the sociallife of Canterbury House, a mixture of fun and endless discussion,as life with Watts was apt to be. Watts and Eleanor kept openhouse, and the house, Watts remembered, "was the scene of analmost perpetual bull session, involving students, seminarists andmembers of the University faculty." On Sunday afternoons therewere tea parties, which lingered on into the cocktail hour "and be-came decidedly merrier than anything ordinarily foreseen in theprospect of tea at the vicarage.'?" On Sunday evenings, whenWatts had completed his seminar, people gathered round the pianoand sang rather racier material than the hymns at Uncle Harry's.Later there was dancing.Perhaps because the members of the group at Canterbury

House did have such a good time together they appeared as a bitcliquish to those outside, though Watts was welcoming to anyonewishing to join the fun. He was not very interested in being a goodcolleague to his fellow clergy, or perhaps was simply not veryinterested in them at all. One former student remembers tryingto get him to a surprise birthday party for a curate in anotherparish and getting a frosty response.As time went on the parties got wilder, as members of the

group around Canterbury House came to trust one another more.Forgetting the proprieties expected of him, or simply sick of them,Watts would play with as much relish as any of his students. Joanremembers him in competitions with students to see who couldpee the highest, and making "bombs" with them of matchheadsin milk bottles, which they exploded in the back garden. Wattshimself remembers one of his students demolishing a streetlight

ro6 ZEN EFFECTS Colored Christian ro7

with an air rifle from inside a car, and though he did not actuallyencourage the student to do it, Watts was driving the car at thetime. On another night the same student and he attached a wireand a wad of sanitary napkins soaked in gasoline to a heliumballoon, lit it, and let it blow away over Lake Michigan. Chicago'sinhabitants, seeing a flame floating in the night sky, excitedlyreported sightings of flying saucers to the police.

While Watts had been training to be an Episcopal priest andpreparing to write his book about the failures of Christianity, thewar in Europe and in the Far East had had little impact on his life.Perhaps the only effect on him was that his parents had beenprevented from visiting him in his new country. In 1946 theywere able at last to visit Evanston. Apart from the pleasure ofseeing their much-loved only child again, they were glad to seeAlan apparently so settled with wife and children, making a suc-cess in a career that Emily in particular admired. Did they, onewonders, have any inkling when they played with the children, ortalked to Eleanor, or saw Alan in the pulpit, that all was notsound? A photograph taken during the visit shows the oldercouple looking pleased and happy, Watts looking evasive,Eleanor looking unhappy and embarrassed, and Ann looking sadand vulnerable. The older Wattses' visit was much appreciatedby the two little girls, who responded to their gentleness andloving interest.The next year Joy Buchan and Aunt Gertrude set off from

England on the exciting trip by boat and train to visit their rela-tives. Joy went on alone to Evanston from Minneapolis wherethey had been visiting Uncle Willy. She was met at the Chicagostation by Watts, and the only change she discovered in him washis beard. She found the children sweet and attentive and Watts

very pleased to see her. He showed her his drawings and paint-ings, calligraphy and photographs, and gave her a copy of Beholdthe Spirit. The life of a clerical household went on around her:choir practices, in which she took part, discussion groups, peopledropping in, visits to the church where Watts preached and cele-brated Communion. Like any visitor from Britain in that austerepostwar period she was fascinated by the variety of food and wroteat length of delicious meals consumed either in the Watts house-hold or at restaurants. Her companion on some of these jaunts torestaurants was a young mathematics student, Dorothy De Witt("Daddy"), who was often a babysitter for Joan and Ann. Some-times too there was a musical evening at Canterbury House, withEleanor and Ann, Doddy, and a young musician called CarltonGamer playing for them, or all of them listening to recordstogether.Joy's diary paints a very favorable picture of the chaplain's

household, a portrait of a man faithful in his pious duties, atten-tive as husband and father, generous and thoughtful as a host,busy and devoted about the occupations of suburban Evanston.Eleanor perhaps emerges as a little distant, performing the dutiesof a hostess; Joy was, in any case, Alan's cousin, not hers. Emilyand Laurence must have loved hearing all the details of the visitwhen Joy got home again to Bromley. Beneath the conventionalhappy family facade, however, all was not well.

1°9Colored ChristianZEN EFFECTS108

So far, i.e., before his ordination, I had had the entire responsibilityfor the home upon my shoulders both financially and socially, aswell as the upbringing of our daughter. Alan lived in his ownparticular "ivory tower" and the practical world seemed to have noreality for him. To my surprise and concern the change to a lovely

I also discovered that he was a frequent masturbator, although Idid not draw any inference from this knowledge at that time.'"The bishop may not have known of Eleanor's depression,

frigidity, and invalidism, but he must have wondered at this pointin the letter whether Watts's "demands" were unreasonable, orwhether he was dealing with a prudish woman who was repulsedby her husband's normal expectations.Most bishops then, and perhaps now, were accustomed to a

situation in which clergy gave so much of their time to caring fortheir parishioners that they often had very little energy left overfor their wives and families. Clergy wives, he would know, wereoften seething with rage that they received very little of theirhusbands' love and attention. Yet it was difficult for them to getsympathy if they complained, since their husbands were dedicatedto God, and God was an impossible rival, worse than anotherwoman. Watts had certainly worked unceasingly since he arrivedin Evanston, and Eleanor had watched him become an importantfigure on campus, with students flocking to services and later intoher home to carryon conversations with him. Once vivacious andattracting attention herself, Eleanor was depressed by her presentcontrasting role as housewife and mother, and took our some ofher temper on the children, particularly on Ann.Eleanor did not tell the bishop of the boredom and frustration

of being the chaplain's wife, however. On the contrary she de-scribes how she had dutifully cherished Alan's vocation to thepriesthood in the hope that the discipline and ideals of the churchwould make him steady and responsible. But, she complains,

Six

Correspondence1947-1950

"My DEAR BISHOP CONKLING," Eleanor Watts wrote in acliffhanger of a letter dated June 29, 1950. "I have never takenany steps to acquaint you with this matter as I have hoped itwould prove unnecessary for me to uphold my status at the costof another's reputation whom I cannot bring myself to judge. ButFather Taber insists that the time has come when my silence canno longer protect the Church, and that I must set before you thecomplete facts of the case that you may be able to act in fullknowledge of the truth."Eleanor was writing not from Canterbury House at Evanston,

but from her mother's house in New York, where she had fledwith her children to the psychiatric care of Charlie Taylor andthe spiritual care of Father Taber."During the first two years of my marriage I became aware that

Alan's preoccupation with sexual matters was extreme," Eleanorwent on, "but as his 'demands' on me were not frequent I con-sidered it highly probable that my lack of understanding of suchthings was coloring my view. His 'demands,' however, were ofa type that made intimate relations most uncomfortable to me and

Correspondence III

home, another child, and a new career did nothing to help thisstate of mind, in fact he retreated further than ever from his familyand his responsibilities as the head of the family. Our intimate rela-tions became mote infrequent, another matter of concern which Iput down to "consideration" on his part."

Eleanor's tone, if somewhat self-righteous, nevertheless sug-gests what a miserable married life they had been pursuing."In May, 1944," Eleanor goes on, "we moved into Canterbury

House. Here again I was left with the full responsibility for thehome and the rearing of the children. Our intimate relations werefew but as his attitude towards me in this sphere was increasinglydistasteful to me, and as I was not well, this state of affairs, al-though unhappy, seemed all that could be expected."The strains between the Warrses, still unnoticeable when Joy

Buchan visited, began to be apparent even to casual visitors. JeanMcDermid, Alan's cousin from Minneapolis, was out motoringone day with her new husband Malcolm, whom Watts had nevermet, and they stopped in to pay a call on the W ames. Wattsanswered the door, but was not his old jolly self, nor did he seempleased to see them. He showed them into his study and madepolite conversation for a bit. Lunch time came, but the half-expected invitation did not come with it. All of a sudden the doorshot open, Eleanor marched furiously in, placed a tray with oneplate on it in front of Watts and went out without speaking tothem. Watts uneasily ate his pork chop. Shocked by this scene, theMcDermids went angrily away, swearing that they would nevercall on the Wames again.Eleanor went on:

In the early summer of 1946 Alan came to me with the story thatone of his students was desirous of having relations with him andasked my advice as to how to handle it. He had visited her in her

rooms on several occasions and had indulged in "necking parties"with her. This announcement came as a complete surprise. I triedmy best to point out to him the incongruity of such a relationshipfor one in his position and how it endangered both his vows as apriest and as a husband. After much argument and discussion weseemed to come to an agreement as to principles."

Alan at last confided to me the whole story of his sexual difficulties.I can only repeat his story to you to the best of my ability.He had been sent to boarding school at the age of seven and

there had been introduced to certain sexual practices by older boysand even a master. In his Preparatory school [she means King'sSchool, Canterbury] this early start was nourished further. Appar-ently sex in all its forms was a constant topic of interest and experi-mentation and added to that was the type of discipline administeredthere [flagellation] which set the pattern for Alan's sex life. Hetold me that he had practiced masturbation more than once dailyfrom his schooldays to the present and that as the phantasy lifewhich accompanied this practice grew more compelling he spenthours in drawing pornographic pictures and reading pornographic

II3Correspondence

Watts's misery in his marriage and his guilt about his sexuallongings had become too much for him. Later he was to say thathe thought that he and Eleanor had clung together so hard in thebeginning that "mutual strangulation" had taken place. This madeeach of them the other's "chattel," and with hindsight he thoughtthis a hopeless kind of relationship: "You must so trust yourpartners as to allow full freedom to be the being that he or she is."·There seemed to be no freedom between him and Eleanor, and eachwas exasperated at the other, Watts seeing a frigid invalid, toodepressed to care for her children, and Eleanor a man whose sexualdesires frightened and disgusted her. She makes it clear to thebishop just what the euphemism, "uncomfortable," which she hadused in her letter, meant to her:

ZEN EFFECTSII2

literature to excite his interest. He also inflicted various torturesupon himself in order to achieve orgasm. [It is interesting in thisconnection to recall his suggestion to his headmaster that beatingbe abolished at the school.}At the time that he married he had hopes that a normal sexual

relationship would prove to be a settling influence but he found tohis dismay that it became increasingly difficult for him to completesuch a normal relationship without some extraordinary stimulus.Over the years of his marriage pornographic interests and phan-

tasy, while more attractive to him than the normal marriage rela-tionship, lost some of their power to stimulate him and he beganto seek stimulation from women outside his marriage."

It is not difficult to imagine how shocked the prudish youngEleanor must have been as her husband tried to tell her what heneeded from her. Without experience, maturity, or even enoughlove for him to try to imagine his feelings, she was left feeling"uncomfortable" and with the conviction that her husband wasincurably "abnormal.""On hearing this story," she tells Conkling, "I was horrified

but, at the same time, sympathetic. I could not see wherein hewas to blame and after much discussion I agreed to do my best asa wife to try to help him overcome his difficulties. I urged him tosee a psychiatrist which he refused to do."It is easy to imagine the couple talking far into the night,

Watts, having begun to speak freely of his sexual distress, almostunable to stop talking, Eleanor too taken up with her owngenerosity to take in fully what he was trying to tell her. At onepoint he openly invited her to beat him, but she indignantlyrefused. He began to consider finding a woman who might respondto his needs, but the image most people had of the clergy madesuch requests difficult.

II4 ZEN EFFECTS Correspondence

By this stage Watts had had enough of being humbled andtold he was in the wrong. He went over to the attack.

(He} began seriously to question my state of mind and I discoveredthat he considered monogamous marriage to be quite out of dateand unable to fulfill the "natural needs of the male." He thenattacked me for my lack of understanding of "male nature" as wellas what he chose to call my frigidity and prudishness. He assuredme that he had never had any intention of remaining "true" to meand that my "ideals" were merely the produce of my own psychoticmind and that I was merely taking refuge in ancient codes to"excuse" my inability to adapt to modern ways. He was not theslightest bit repentant and absolutely refused to discuss his affairswith an older priest as he said that such a priest "could not behonest as he would have vested interests" to consider.

Watts by now felt certain that Eleanor could not help him, thatthe only way he could cope with his sexual needs was to lookoutside his marriage, a fairly desperate situation for someone whosejob demanded monogamy and sexual circumspection. He beganto nag Eleanor ceaselessly to change her "ideals" and Eleanor, indespair, consulted a priest herself, a Father Duncan. Father Duncanasked Watts to visit him, but Watts refused, and Duncan's recom-mendation to Eleanor was that she leave him. Explaining to BishopConkling why she did not do that, Eleanor remarked, piously, that

I believed in his religious teaching and felt bound to save that atany cost. I was sure his priesthood would suffer if I left him andbesides I considered myself a married woman and did not wish torun away from what I considered to be my responsibility to Alan.I realize now that I was quite wrong to attempt to protect him inthis way. It was not honest, but the summer I had lived throughwith the pressure from Alan had so confused me that I thought

perhaps he was right and that my "Ideals" might be as foolish andunreal as he consideredthem to be.

In fact during 1947 Eleanor had become friends with a musicstudent, Carlton Gamer, ten years younger than herself. They hadarranged that he would give her a weekly piano lesson in returnfor a Sunday dinner at the Wattses' house. Gradually Eleanor andCarlton discovered many tastes in common, she confided her un-happy marital situation to him, and before long the two of themhad fallen in love. Eleanor reported this new development toWatts, obviously expecting him to behave like an outraged hus-band, only to discover that he seemed rather to like the idea. Heeven read her a little lecture about getting it right. "He hoped Iwould not make life miserable for Carlton by my frigidity andprudery and that as long as I gave up any idea of divorce, he couldsee no hindrance to an affair for us.... To my horror I discoveredthat he still expected me to fulfil my 'wifely obligations' to him,the fact that I was loved by another man being very stimulatingto him.:"At Watts's suggestion Carlton moved into Canterbury House.

It was a bizarre arrangement for any household, but particularlyso for a clerical family in the 1940s. Joan still remembers tryingto puzzle out why their home life seemed so different from otherpeople's. Eleanor undoubtedly had a greater enthusiasm for thisarrangement than appears in her disingenuous letter to BishopConkling in which she suggests that she only put up with it forthe sake of helping Watts keep his job. In fact she and Watts wenton a long motoring holiday to California with Carlton during thesummer of 1948, and soon after that she became pregnant byCarlton. Watts cannot have been as content with the arrangementas Eleanor makes him appear. He knew that campus gossip, orEleanor's growing bitterness, could destroy him.

Correspondence 117In June 1948 Eleanor flew to New York to consult Ruth, who

suggested that she pay another visit to the psychiatrist, CharlesTaylor, who had helped her in the past. Taylor, Eleanor claimed,urged her to leave Alan and to remove the children from hisinfluence.She returned home with a challenge. Either Warts must re-

ceive psychiatric treatment, or she would leave him. Well awarethat refusal meant that he would lose his job, since he was re-quired to appear happily married, Watts did visit a psychiatrist, butsoon showed that he had no intention of changing. He refusedonce again to accept the help of a fellow priest.Michael, Eleanor's son by Carlton, was born in June 1949, an

event both the Wattses' daughters remember with pain. Alwaysambivalent in her feelings about her daughters, particularly Ann,Eleanor suddenly switched all attention away from the two littlegirls and concentrated it on the longed-for son, perhaps in part toteach her husband that she no longer cared for him at all. Joanand Ann, already suffering in a difficult and bewildering situation,felt this loss of affection very acutely. Joan went away to boardingschool at Versailles, Kentucky, while Ann continued unhappilywith her mother.Finally, in July 1949, Eleanor set off once again for New York

to consult Ruth, Ruth's lawyer, and Dr. Taylor. All three of themrecommended a divorce, and in September Eleanor finally leftWatts, taking the three children with her to settle in New Yorkwith Ruth. She was in a dilemma. She wished to be free to marryCarlton and wanted the sort of divorce that proved the matri-monial fault to be Alan's, yet the birth of a child by another manmade her seem other than the innocent victim she pretended tobe.She could only vindicate her own actions by exaggerating theoddness of Watts's behavior. Father Taber, who, only a few years

ZEN EFFECTS1I6

As far as I myself am concerned I can only say that throughoutthis altair I have acted in the only way I saw possible, wrong asthat has been. I have constantly had the good of the Church in mymind although I have made dreadful mistakes in endeavoring toaccomplish that good, nor have I understood in what that goodconsisted. However, I have made my peace with the Church andperhaps my honesty with my advisors here has been an importantfactor in the mercy and considerationthey have shown me, and thefaith they have that I am ready for a "Christian rnarriage.l"

before, had encouraged Watts to become a priest, now thoughtthat an annulment was the answer, so early in 1950 Eleanor wentoff to Reno and secured her annulment on the grounds that at thetime of her marriage her husband had concealed from her that hewas a "sexual pervert." (Alan's version of this in his autobiog-raphy was that the Nevada annulment was obtained on thegrounds that he believed in "free love.") Anxious to absolveherself in Bishop Conkling's eyes Eleanor wrote,

Bishop Conkling had every faith in Father Taber's assessmentof the situation. He was deeply touched at the thought of all thatthis wealthy penitent had endured and sent a sympathetic reply.Unfortunately, Carl Wesley Gamer, Carlton's father, saw it all

very differently, and he in his turn wrote to the bishop. TheGarners had slowly become aware that their son did not wish tocome home for vacations, that he preferred to spend his summersin Evanston, and in 1948 he announced that he was to go on a

. . h IIcar trip through the western states with the Wattses, Wit aexpenses paid by them. Only gradually did his parents discoverthe arrangement in which Carlton was living, and at last theylearned with horror that he had had a child with a married woman,ten years older than himself and the wife of a minister. Not un-

reasonably Carl Gamer felt that the Wattses had exploited his sonwhile he was under 21, that Eleanor had seduced him, and herhusband had connived at the fact. He considered bringing chargesagainst Watts, especially after hearing from Carlton that in viewof Eleanor's annulment there would now be no objection to amarriage, either civil or ecclesiastical. Father Taber had evenpointed out the relevant canon to the couple that would allowthem a church marriage.Sickened by this piece of casuistry and determined to impede

an unpromising marriage, Gamer senior attacked the church forits apparent complacency in Eleanor's conduct and suggested thateven under the lenient law of Nevada, Eleanor could not haveobtained an annulment if the full facts had been known to thecourt. In a letter to Bishop Conkling he writes, "Her annulmentwas a case of 'clear fraud' perpetrated upon a court. In additionto that, Eleanor by her affaire with Carlton, appears to haveviolated the criminal statutes of both Illinois and New York Stateand furthermore a federal statute which carries with it confine-ment in the penitentiary.:"Bishop Conkling was able to sidestep the issue of Eleanor's re-

marriage since it came under the jurisdiction of the bishop of NewYork, but Watts, on the other hand, was his concern.As the situation worsened between him and Eleanor during

1949, Watts knew that it was only a matter of time before hisprivate life was public knowledge. He had worked well and en-thusiastically at his chaplain's job, and he dreaded the thought ofthe gossip and rumor, knowing it would destroy his career anduncover his private wounds. The humiliation of being the objectof sexual gossip, the shock and disappointment of his parents, thesurprise of friends and relatives who had believed the two ofthem to be happily married, the loss of his children, the bitter

CorrespondenceZEN EFFECTSu8

return to unemployment all made the future look hopeless. Hecontinued alone at Canterbury House knowing that sooner or laterthe blow would fall.Even before he received Eleanor's letter, Bishop Conkling had

begun to hear rumors that the Wattses' marriage was breaking up,and he wrote to Watts in May of 1950 to ask for information.Was it true that Eleanor was divorcing him? He asked Watts tocome to see him.Watts, just back from a trip to Kentucky, to see Joan at board-

ing school, wrote that he hoped divorce would be avoidable.When he went to see the bishop, Watts managed to suggest thathe and Eleanor were having a temporary separation, and that themarriage would continue.By the end of June, when Eleanor wrote her long letter to

Bishop Conkling, she had already secured her Reno annulment.Her letter blackened Watts successfully in the bishop's eyes, andhe was touched by the picture of the suffering woman - until afew weeks later when he heard the Garners' side of the story.Regardless of who was to blame for what, it was plain enough

to Watts that it was all up so far as his career in the church wasconcerned. His pride was badly hurt, and rather than waiting forprocesses of dismissal or even working out his resignation, he leftCanterbury House for Thornecrest Farmhouse in Millbrook, NewYork, where a friend lent him a house. All the hard work andenthusiasm he had put into his work as chaplain was destroyed.He was in no mood for penitence. Furious over what had

happened, he wrote the bishop a long letter full of abrasivecriticism of the church and its hypocrisy. He said that he had nowdecided to abandon not only the priesthood, but also the com-munion of the Episcopal church: "Part of the reason is that, having

in mind both the proper care of my two girls and my own essentialneeds, I am quite sure that I must marry again.?"His original attraction to the priesthood, he says, had really

been one of nostalgia, part of the common tendency to yearn forthe securities of the past. Gradually, he had come to feel that theancient forms of ritual, beautiful and profound as they were, nolonger spoke effectively to modern men and women. His ownministry had enjoyed a kind of success because he had tried someoriginal approaches, some of them borrowed from other spiritualtraditions. Yet he was full of doubt about Christianity. "Somehowor other the language, the forms, of the Church are ceasing to beeither relevant or communicative. Forms lose their power, perhapsbecause all material things die, or because the Spirit within themis breaking them as a bird breaks from its shell."Spiritual life, he thought, now depended upon ceasing to cling

to any form of security. "Forms are not contrary to the Spirit," helectures his bishop, "but it is their nature to perish. I wish I couldtake this step without hurting the Church. For the Church ispeople - people whom I have learned to love. Yet for that verylove, I cannot be a party to their hurting themselves and othersby seeking security from forms which, if understood aright, arecrying, 'Do not cling to us!'"It is difficult to take these high-minded reasons for leaving the

church at their face value when Watts had shown no signs ofwishing to leave until his position became impossible - he hadtaken the church's money and preached its accepted wisdom fairlyuncritically. Whatever truth in his observations, it seems toostriking a coincidence that the church's value in general seemedto decline in Watts's eyes just at the moment that it rejected him.The church's mistake, he said, was to insist that it was the "best

120 ZEN EFFECTS Correspondence 121

What I see is what life has shown me: that in fear I cling to my-self, and that such clinging is quite futile. I have found that tryingto stop this self-strangulation through discipline, belief in God,prayer, resort to authority and all the rest, is likewise futile. Fortrying not to be selfish, trying to realize an ideal, is simply theoriginal selfishness in another form. I can understand worship asan act of thanksgiving for God's love, but the formularies of the

of all ways to God." "Obviously one who has found a great truthis eager to share it with others. But to insist - often in ignoranceof other revelations - that one's own is supreme argues a certaininferiority complex characteristic of all imperialisms." This claimto supremacy, anxiety for certainty, and wish to proselytize, seemedto him a tragic form of "self-strangulation."In the letter he also returned to the idea that there was some-

thing strange and absurd about treating a clergyman as a "moralexemplar." It was "an aspect of that unfortunate moral self-consciousness which has so long afflicted our civilization."It was no good telling people they ought to love and then

blaming them if they couldn't do it, he added with feeling. "Themoralism which condemns a man for not loving is simply addingstrength to that sense of fear and insecurity which prevents himfrom loving. You may help him to love neither by condemningnor consoling, but by encouraging him to understand and acceptthe fear and insecurity which he feels." Instead of this healingacceptance he felt that Christian attitudes to sex had aggravatedpeople's fear, had taught many to "foster a simulated love whichis fear in disguise." This approach made the church's dealings withmarriage clumsy and inept, more concerned with protecting asocial institution than helping people to love.He is not, he says, an antinomian.

Watts continues by saying that he has no intention of joiningany other religious body. He expects to devote his working timeto writing and talking "because I love this work more than anyother, and believe I have something to say which is worth saying.:""It was a startling letter for Bishop Conkling to receive. He must

have felt rather as a judge might if he were to receive a morallecture from a prisoner on whom he was about to pass sentence.Here was Watts, having committed adultery and encouraged hiswife to commit adultery, causing a public scandal to the church,and running away from his job without asking leave, telling hisbishop in no uncertain terms that the whole thing was the church'sfault. Whether or not one agrees with his strictures, some ofWatts's statements are movingly self-revelatory. If nothing else,

12 3

Church make it all too plain that it is likewise to be understood asa means of spiritual self-advancement.The more clearly I see the futility of trying to raise myself by

my own spiritual boot-straps (of which asking the grace to beraised is but an indirect form), the less choice I have in the matter:I cannot go on doing it. At a yet deeper level- the more I amaware of the futility of clinging to self. I have no choice but tostop clinging. And I find that in this choiceless bondage one ismiraculously free....I have no thought of trying to persuade anyone to "follow my

example" and leave the Church likewise. You cannot act rightly byimitating the actions of another, for this is to act without under-standing, and where there is no understanding the vicious circlecontinues. I have no wish to lead a movement away from theChurch, or any such nonsense. If any leave, as I do, I trust they willdo so on their own account, not from choice, not because they feelthey "should," but only if, as in my own case, understanding makesit clear that, for them, there is no other alternative.

CorrespondenceZEN EFFECTS122

he deserves top marks for cheek. With an amusing effrontery thatCoyote might have affected, he appeared to saunter away from theencounter with the air of one who thinks he is the victor. BishopConkling was left to fret and fume, writing strong expressionsin the margin of Watts's letter: "What conceit!!" "This is nottrue," "What does he mean by love?" "rationalizing for his owndesire," and "a perverted man's perverted sight!" Surprisingly, inthe end he wrote Watts a rather courreous letter.

12 4 ZEN EFFECTS

Seven

A PriestInhibited

My dear Alan,

Though your letter grieves me yet it is not a surprise. I do notbelieve there is any need for comment on your position. When anindividual moves as far as you have from the group, words havelittle avail. Sometimes the individual proves to be a leader and tohave a genius for truth; more often he shows himself in a muchless complimentary position.... I am grateful for all you tried todo for good in your ministry and I commend you to the justice andmercy of God.Sincerelyyours,Wallace E. Conkling, The Bishop of Chicago.Chicago, Illinois, July 5, 1950.11

Watts had robbed Bishop Conkling of any chance to dismisshim. He had already written his letter of resignation to the appro-priare commirtee and had married Dorothy De Witt, the graduatestudent who had been the babysitter of his two daughters. Thisaction automatically secured excommunication, since in the eyesof the Church he was still married.

WATTS AND HIS NEW WIFE moved to a temporary home,Thornecrest Farmhouse, in Millbrook, New York, in July 1950,"one of those archaic rural structures whose rooms are severeclosetless boxes with small window-frames decaying from muchpainting." It was bitterly cold that winter, and they found them-selves spending much of their time in the kitchen to keep warm.Watts spent a lot of his day writing - letters to his friends and toothers explaining or justifying the turn his life had taken, and anew book, to be called, appropriately enough, The Wisdom ofInsecurity.His financial situation seemed, at first, rather desperate. From

being a rising young priest-theologian who had written a very goodbook about Christianity and was enormously in demand as a lec-turer, he had suddenly become a pariah within the Christiancommunity. He had lost his job and his income and the riches thataccompanied life with Eleanor - after their annulment he hadfelt bound to return the stock she had made over to him. Hisstudies and his natural inclination only fitted him for one thing:"to wonder ... at the nature of the universe," as he put it. The

difficulty was to see how to make a living at it. Very fortunatelythe writer Joseph Campbell intervened for Watts and got him agrant from the Bollingen Foundation, an institution founded onLake Zurich by a wealthy patient of C. G. Jung, which was pre-pared to finance research in myth, psychology, Oriental philosophy,and many other subjects that interested Watts. The theme of hisnew book qualified for enough money to keep the Watts house-hold for sixmonths.The new situation might have been easier if Watts had been

deeply in love with Dorothy, but love was not one of his mainreasons for marrying her. Spared as he had been by Eleanor'smoney and by the care of his parents from any real need to cometo terms with the more humdrum details of life, he felt dependenton Dorothy's sheer practicality to help him through this difficultphase. Each of them, it seemed to him later, had hopes of "makingover" the other into the person each really wanted to be marriedto. Finally, and most important, he believed that marriage gavehim the opportunity to offer a home to Joan and Ann, whom hedeeply loved.Dorothy, for her part, found herself in a most painful position.

Whether or not she believed that Watts loved her, the glamorousyoung priest who had been so much admired at Northwestern wassuddenly a disgraced man without job or income. During the holi-days she was saddled with Joan. (Ann had gone to New York tolive with Eleanor and her grandmother.) She had had to give upher own graduate work in mathematics and was stuck in a bleakfarmhouse with an unhappy man uncertain of the future.Even in adversity, however, Watts was good at enjoying what-

ever was to be enjoyed. During evenings and weekends he sethimself to learn cooking, a skill he would be proud of all his life.He and Dorothy began to cook ambitious meals together to such

Penitence was a price Watts had no intention of paying. Hereplied, saying that he knew perfectly well that he was always apriest, but "I have no thought whatever of going back to a formerstate, or making a fresh start." There is an insecurity, he suggests,to be welcomed by those who will not use religion as a guaranteeof safety: "One may embrace this kind of insecurity as a gestureof adolescent bravado. One may also embrace it, because, having

It is not easy, not possible, to undo spiritual commitments. You area priest forever- and a priest inhibited. You think you can wipeour your ordination, restore that which was before your ordination,start all over.You can't. Life is not like that. What has been, still is.I remain your friend, but I see no good in our seeing one another,

nor in correspondence,at least for as long as you are able to per-suade yourself that you are content. If ever this becomes no longerpossible, call on me and count on an understanding response.f

12 7A Priest Inhibited

an extent that they were able to serve an elegant Christmas feastof pa.tede veau en crotite and turkey with chestnut stuffing to suchhouse guests as the Campbells, their benefactors, Ananda Coornara-swamy's widow Luisa, and the composer John Cage.Not a bitter man by nature, Watts was, however, angty about

what he felt as his public disgrace, endlessly going over it all inhis mind, explaining and justifying it all to others. Even when hecame to write about it in his autobiography, over twenty yearslater, the details still rankled. He published the circular letter hehad sent to his friends, itself a working over of the long exculpa-tory and critical letter he had sent to Bishop Conkling. Theresponses were various. The one he found most unforgettable,because of its tone of moral superiority, was from Canon IddingsBell, the reviewer who had thought Behold the Spirit one of thehalf dozen most significant books of the century.Canon Bell wrote reproachfully:

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We, too, would like to be one of those, but as we start to meditateand look into ourselves we find mostly a quaking and palpitatingmess of anxiety which lusts and loathes, needs love and attention,

Depressed as he was, and disillusioned both about himself andthe world that had rejected him so resoundingly, Watts began to

think more about God and about the God-filled person "whollyfree from fear and attachment," Such a person was to be envied,he thought.

As a layman in the church I have been in doubt again and againas to whether my proper course should be to remain in the church,and, in all humility, tty to fight its multiple failures and abuses, orwhether I should leave it and join the vast army of the unchurched.Rightly or wrongly I still feel that I should take the first course andthat is what I am doing, although with great misgivings at times.Meanwhile, you have a tremendous contribution to make as ascholar and teacher from your new vantage point."

A Priest Inhibited

and lives in terror of death putting an end to its misery. So wedespise that mess, and put "how the true mystic feels" in its place,not realizing that this ambition is simply one of the lusts of thequaking mess,and that this, in turn, is a natural form of the universelike rain and frost,slugs and snails."

The blessing that came to him in his distress was the realizationthat his own "quaking mess," as he called it, was natural, even apart of the divine. What he needed to do was live it, not fightagainst it. Eleanor's departure had released him forever from theneed to pretend to be something he wasn't, a "respectable" personas defined by the mores of his time. "I am a mystic in spite ofmyself," he wrote, "remaining as much of an irreducible rascalas I am, as a standing example of God's continuing compassionfor sinners or, if you will, of Buddha-nature in a dog, or lightshining in darkness. Come to think of it, in what else could itshine?..7It was this new insight that Watts explored movingly in his new

book, which was dedicated to Dorothy, his partner in insecurity.Swinging sharply away from Christianity he suggests that it is notdogma but wonder that is the window on life. Writing out of hisown uncertainty he says that "salvation and sanity consist in themost radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves."Instead of the pitiful human tricks to avoid insecurity by clingingto one idol or another, and in particular to the idols buried in theheart of religion, the answer is to embrace insecurity by living eachmoment intensely as it happens.In a desperate attempt to avoid the moments of pain and to

know only pleasure, the Western mind had fallen into a tragicduality in which body and mind were dangerously split. Body,with its fine instinctual wisdom, had become the enemy of "will,"the device with which we fondly imagine insecurity can be de-

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seen the futility of other courses, there is nothing else to do. As aresult I feel my priesthood to be uninhibited rather than, as form-erly, inhibited."?Other clerical friends were shocked at his suggestion that

Christianity might have anything to learn from other religions."There are many religions. There is but one gospel," wrote one ofthem. "Religions are man's search for God; the gospel is God'ssearch for men." To which Watts replied that he believed Christwas not the only incarnation of God: "The identical theme ofGod's search for man is the essence of the Hindu doctrine of theAvatars, and the Buddhist Bodhisarrvas. For me they are all in-carnations of 'the only begotten 50n·...4

Another correspondent, Theodore Green, wrote warmly ofWatts's new position, a letter without judgment or criticism,which Watts quoted in his autobiography.

ZEN EFFECTS13°feated. The body became both feared and despised, "Brother Ass,"as Saint Francis dubbed it and as many Christian saints had ex-perienced it. But to lose touch with the body, said Watts, is to losetouch with our real feelings and emotions, and to sink into an"insatiable hunger" for possessions, food, drink, sexuality withouttenderness, and crude sensation of all kinds. The answer is torediscover the rhythms and wisdom of the body, to help it to livenaturally and spontaneously. Aiming at security "means to isolateand fortify the 'I,' but it is just the feeling of being an isolated Iwhich makes me feel lonely and afraid.?"Watts was beginning to speak in the voice that would become

famous in the sixties, a voice that would speak for the lonelinessand alienation of many. The loss of his clerical career was pushingWatts back to a rediscovery of his old Buddhist beliefs.

Eight

The Wisdomof Insecurity1951-1960

IN FEB RUARY 195 I Alan Watts and Dorothy drove westward,away from the harsh winter of the East, heading for Los Angelesand eventually San Francisco. On the earlier visit, with Eleanorand Carlton, Watts had been captivated by California. Now itdelighted him all over again as he came upon the Mojave desert,the palm trees and dates of Indio, the misty San Bernardino range,finally Los Angeles itself. There Aldous Huxley and ChristopherIsherwood had set up a meeting for him with Isherwood's guruSwami Prabhavananda and his Vedanrist followers. PredictablyWatts disagreed with the swami's emphasis on asceticism, sexualcontinence, and will power, and he mischievously let it drop thathe thought orgasm was analogous, if not in some sense identicalwith, samadhi, or mystical experience. The swami's response wasequally predictable; he was dismayed at the idea that enlighten-ment might come without effort and discipline.In early March the Wattses passed through the country between

LosAngeles and San Francisco, where Watts was overwhelmed bythe beauty of the Santa Lucia range of mountains. At Big Sur he

ZEN EFFECTS

stopped to call on Henry Miller (who was away), but he fell inlove with Partington Ridge, with its waterfalls, aromatic herbsand hay - "sage, wild thyme, sorrel, Indian Paintbrush, and acresof dangerous fire-prone golden grass three to four feet high, amidstwhich one can sometimes discover rattlesnake grass with its light,fragile, and airy heads designed like the rattlesnake's tail, or likethose Japanese fish ornaments."!From there they continued on to San Francisco itself, where an

old London acquaintance, Frederic Spiegelberg, had had the ideaof setting up what he called the American Academy of AsianStudies and had invited Watts to join him. The plan, as under-stood by the backers, was that the academy should be an informa-tion service at graduate level, an independent school grantingmaster's and doctor's degrees, that would meet the new Americaninterest in all things Asian. Its offerings would include Asianlanguages, art, histories, politics, and religion taught at a morepractical level than the more formal Oriental departments at exist-ing universities. Businessmen, government officials, teachers, andinterested travelers would, it was thought, benefit from suchcourses, and initially funds came from such business, which set theacademy up in the financial district of San Francisco.At heart, however, both Spiegelberg and Watts had a more

ambitious plan, nothing less, in Watts's words, than "the practicaltransformation of human consciousness.?"With the latter rather than the former plan secretly in mind

they built up the staff of the new academy. Prof. Haridas Chaud-huri came from the University of Calcutta. Sir C. P. RamaswamyAiyar, previously dewan of the state of Travancore, was anotherrecruit, "a princely man, close to seventy, who somehow remindedone of the elephant god Ganesha." Judith Tyberg, who came to

The Wisdom of Insecurity 133

teach Sanskrit and yoga, a Japanese lama, Tokwan Tada, thePolish/English writer Rom Landau, who taught Islamic studies,and a Thai scholar who was also a princess - Poon Pismai Diskul- made up the rest of the staff.Watts, for whom six months previously life had looked so grim,

had found himself a paying job that couldn't have been more con-genial to him in a climate and part of the world that he found ajoy to live in. He, Dorothy, Joan (during her school vacations),and Ann moved briefly to Palo Alto, and then to a house onWoodside Drive off Skyline Boulevard. When the children firstsaw it they loved It; it was a log cabin surrounded by woods wherethey could play at tracking and camping, a magical place wheretheir imaginations could run free.In other ways the children's lives were not so happy. The two

of them, ten and six years old, while visiting Ruth's house in NewYork, had been summoned separately to the library of the brown-stone and asked to choose which parent they wanted to live with.The pain was acute. Joan described it this way:

It was like being asked to choose between the devil and the deepblue sea.We loved our father; he had been most caring towards usduring the difficult times at Evanston. If ever our parents weregoing anywhere, Eleanor was always the one who didn't let uscome; basically she didn't want us around. Whereas Alan alwayssaid, "Sure, come along." Even though we disliked Dorothy we stillhad this tremendous feeling of our father loving us, and I am surethat coloredour choice- we both chose to live with him.

Both Ann and Joan were already very unhappy at their parents'divorce, and Ann had spent some wretched months with Eleanor

and Michael at Ruth's house. Eleanor continued to ignore her infavor of Michael and to find her naughtiness intolerable. WhenDorothy gave birth to a daughter, Tia, the situation felt to Annand Joan like a repetition of Michael's birth.Joan went off to boarding school and Ann found comfort in

the blessed world of school, partly, as she began to read, intothe fantasy world of books. She had some children's books withbeautiful illustrations given her by Ruth and by her parents, andalone in her room, or late at night in bed, she would pore overthem for hours.In addition, sometimes Watts, who knew how to set up a treat,

would take her alone with him to a restaurant, usually where thecooking was exotic, and feeling very grown-up and proud to be outwith him, she would loyally develop tastes for strange kinds offood. When she was ill her father could be very kind to her,bringing her hot toddies, reading to her, playing with her. As aresult she longed to be ill and tried to bring it about by standingout in the rain without a coat. Sometimes he would take her withhim to the academy where she wandered about happily, talking to

faculty and students while Watts lectured or went to meetings.Maybe people at the academy perceived something about herunchildlike sadness and her need for love. In particular, WattS'ssecretary Lois became a friend and used to take her out on ex-peditions, treating her, to her delight, as if she were grown up.She received the love and attention eagerly, drawing from it anelement of sanity that seemed missing from her family life.But despite Watts's loving ways, he could let Ann down by not

giving her the real help and understanding that she wanted andneeded from her father.Joan too was having problems with her father at the time. She

The academy was attracting students. It was a simple building ofclassrooms and offices, with a library largely stocked with booksfrom Watts's huge collection. Many of the pupils who came wereartists or poets, and once a week Spiegelberg held a colloquium inwhich there was intense discussion about the contributions of Eastand West, the nature of the self, methods of meditation, and othersuch ideas that had interested Warts for years. Watts pushed the

remembers waiting at school with other girls to be fetched for ahalf-term vacation. One by one the others disappeared with rela-tives, until it gradually became obvious that no one was comingto fetch her. Out of kindness a teacher offered to take her homefor the holiday.Watts, we may feel, hated himself at this period of his life,

mainly because, in his longing to "belong," he conformed to aconventional middle-class pattern that he despised. In his longhours at the academy he was as much a workaholic as any suc-cessful businessman, he had little time to spare for his wife andchildren, he was habitually unfaithful with various young women.As so often in his life, he had a taste for the good things moneycould buy - a very pleasant house, books, Oriental objects, a re-laxed style of entertaining - yet he resented the cost to himselfof the pressures and claims of a growing family, and felt no com-punction in dodging the chores and responsibilities. His hard work,his wit and charm, were reserved for his students and colleagues,for the women he easily attracted.Slowly, he came to feel that the price paid for the comfort of

his present life was too high, and perhaps that the life itself - thatof an absentee husband and father - was not a good or dignifiedone. He was searching for a way out.

135The Wisdom of InsecurityZEN EFFECTS134

had been haunting the University of California in Berkeley as avoraciousreader and auditor of courseswithout the slightest interestin credits,examinations or degrees.... He was ... simply interestedin knowledge. His material ambitions were minimal; he lived inextreme simplicity; such money as he had went mostly for books,which he gave away; he had a ribald, bawdy, belly-laugh attitudeto life which cameout at unexpectedmoments, and was so informed

From the beginning Watts and Snyder got on very well. Be-cause there were still few students, Watts had plenty of time totalk and to enjoy informal meetings. He was, at this stage, Snyderremembers, "very straight, very British, short hair, necktie." OnFriday nights the two of them started going to a study group atthe Berkeley British Church; one night Watts drove Snyder homefrom a meeting and they finished a bottle of wine together andtalked deeply about Buddhism. The friendship really took off,however, when Snyder sent Watts a letter on some points of dis-cussion between them and wrote it in italic calligraphy. Calligra-phy, one of Watts's great enthusiasms, became another sharedpleasure between them like their interest in classical Chinese. De-tails of translation and interpretation became a running topicbetween them, and at Watts's invitation, Snyder gave readings ofhis Chinese translations at the academy. His relationship withWatts at this time, he remembers, was comfortable, respectful onhis part, the relationship of a pupil with a good teacher.Another of Watts's students at this time was Lock McCorkle,

later to be a key man in est. McCorkle, like a number of otherstudents at the academy, was a pacifist; he was fighting a jailsentence for resisting the draft, and Watts gave evidence in hisdefense in court.Watts was excited by the originality and intellectual vitality of

his students. One of them, Leo Johnson,

ZEN EFFECTS

idea, which some of his Asian colleagues already believed, that"the egocentric predicament was not a moral fault to be correctedby willpower, but a conceptual hallucination requiring some basicalterations of common sense." Chaudhuri said that the illusion ofthe isolated, separate ego could only be overcome by yoga andmeditation. Watts replied that to try to unseat the ego by sum-moning up its own strength and resources to help you to do it waslike trying to lift yourself off the ground; it couldn't be done.Methods of meditation, he said, only worked if they showed theego and its will to be unreal. Fellow members of the faculty affec-tionately accused him of laziness.The school was turning out to be a wonderful meeting ground

for unusual and interesting people. A group of artists, includingJean Varda and the surrealist Gordon Onslow-Ford, attended theacademy, and so later on did Michael Murphy and Richard Price,the founders of Esalen. The poet Gary Snyder was among thepupils. Snyder was later described by Watts as "a wiry sage withhigh cheek-bones, twinkling eyes, and a thin beard, and the recipefor his character requires a mixture of Oregon woodsman, seaman,Amerindian shaman, Oriental scholar, San Francisco hippie, andswinging monk, who takes tough discipline with a light heart. Heseems to be gently keen about almost everything, and needs noaffectation to make himself interesting." He had read the prospec-tus of the academy in a journal of Asian studies and thought itseemed worth looking at. He had studied anthropology and linguis-tics in Indiana and had decided to attend the University of Cali-fornia for graduate studies in classical Chinese and contemporaryJapanese. He went to hear Watts lecture, got talking to anotherman in the audience, Claud Dahlenberg, who later joined the SanFrancisco Zen Center, and as a result got taken along to theacademy and began to attend Watts's lectures.

The Wisdom of Insecurity 137

intellectual, but he turned out to be a man of singular com-passion and humor, as well as of good sense in the practicalmatters of life."

The academy was an arena in which people asked the hardestquestions about living; it was a long way from the "informationservice" it had once purported to be. But its success in touchingspiritual and philosophical depths did not help it financially. Inthe autumn of 1952 the "angel" who had maintained it thus farran out of funds and could no longer pay the salaries. FredericSpiegelberg resigned as director and went to teach at Stanford. ButWatts, "having nothing else to do, decided that the Academy wasan adventure too interesting to be abandoned, and slipped by de-fault into the position of its administrator." The academy movedfrom the financial district to a rambling old mansion on Broad-way in Pacific Heights. For another four years Watts managedto keep this offbeat and exciting project alive. He invited manyinteresting people to lecture, among them D. T. Suzuki, G. P.Malalaskera, Buddhist scholar and diplomat, Bhikku Pannanandafrom Thailand, the Zen master Asahina Sogen, the Thera Dhar-mawara from Cambodia, and his ex-mother-in-Iaw, Ruth FullerSasaki, "who entranced the whole student body with her formaland definitive lecture on the use of koan in Zen meditation." Itwas as a result of Ruth's visit, and Watts's introduction of GarySnyder to her, that Snyder was later given a scholarship grant totake him to Japan.San Francisco was, in many ways, an ideal setting for the acad-

emy. Faculty and students visited, on the warmest terms, with theChinese Buddhist community of San Francisco. Japanese Buddhistsin the city also became deeply involved with the academy. HodoTobase, a Zen master at the Soto Zen temple on Bush Street,

ZEN EFFECTS

with intellectual expertise that it was a real risk to expose him toscholarly company.. , Leo impressed upon me the important ideathat the ego was neither a spiritual, psychological, or biologicalreality but a social institution of the same order as the monogamousfamily, the calendar, the clock, the metric system,and the agreementto drive on the right or left of the road. He pointed out that at suchtimes such social institutions became obsolete . . . and that the"Christian ego" was now plainly inappropriate to the ecologicalsituation into which we were moving."

Another student, Pierre Grimes, had been "nurtured on Plato,"but in working with Watts

he had graduated to Nagarjuna and began very practical experi-ments with that great Mahayanist's philosophy. He saw that Na-garjuna's method was a dialectical process that went far beyondsophistry and intellectual acrobatics, and could be used as a verypowerful instrument for what I had in mind - namely, the dis-solution of erroneous concepts felt as precepts. Pierre devised anencounter group on the metaphysicalleve!. That is to say,he workedout a situation in which the participants would probe for eachother's basic assumptions, or axioms, about life, and then demon-strate that they were no more than assumptions; not truths, butarbitraty game-rules. This dialectic was as traumatic for a logicalpositivist as for a Hegelian, for as basic assumptions crumbled, mem-bers of the group would begin to show intense anxiety. He wouldthen probe for still deeper assumptions underlying the anxiety untilhe could bring the group to a state of consciousness in which theycould happily relax, and abandon the frustrating and futile projectof trying to make a false hypothesis called "I," on the one hand,get mastery over another false hypothesis called "experience" or"the world," on the other. The process seemed extraordinarilytherapeutic both for Pierre himself and for those who workedwith him. I had feared that he would become a scornful, prickly

The Wisdom of Insecurity 139

ZEN EFFECTS14°taught calligraphy at the academy, his assistant priest gave Wattslessons on Zen texts, and another Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki,saw the possibilities of developing "Western Zen" on the WestCoast and went on to found San Francisco Zen Center. On oneoccasion Watts took a whole party of students on a "joy ride" tovisit Krishnamurti at Ojai, camping at night on a beach at Carpin-teria, with fires of driftwood.

In 1952 Laurence and Emily visited Alan and Dorothy and weredistressed at Ann's state of physical and psychological health. Ann,at ten years old, was afflictedwith gastric ulcers. Gently, Laurenceand Emily suggested a way out - that Ann might come to livewith them in England - and soAnn returned with them to RowanCottage. This was the beginning of a much happier time for Ann.Emily, who had so longed for a daughter, poured love and careon the little girl, who felt as if she was allowed to be a child forthe first time in her life. She stayed with her grandparents for thenext eight years, going to school at Farrington's, behind the gardenat Rowan Cottage.In 1953 Watts, Dorothy, Joan, and Tia moved to Mill Valley

in Marin County. There was a big garden - a former gardennursery - with a big lawn, four great pine trees, twenty-sevenfruit trees, a stream, cats and chickens, nice neighbors, a Volks-wagen bus in which to transport the children, and a big library.Dorothy, according to Watts, had very much wanted the sub-

urban life, and it may be that he relished its comforts more thanhe later cared to remember. In any case the move to new surround-ings was a distraction from the real difficulties of the marriage,from Dorothy's resentment that Watts was away for most wakinghours and for some of the sleeping ones too. He was at the acad-

The Wisdom of Insecurity 141

emy, or he was out with friends, or he was broadcasting on theBerkeley radio station KPFA or appearing on the educationaltelevision station KQED. In addition, Dorothy was suspicious,with good cause, that he was unfaithful to her with other women.She had reason to be bitter, not least because she was expectinganother child, Mark, and she enjoyed very little of her husband'scare and attention.

In 1954 the Japanese artist and printmaker Sabro Hasegawavisited the academy, and Watts was so delighted by his person-ality and his skills as a lecturer and teacher that he immediatelyinvited him to join the staff. Not only was he a fine teacher ofsumi-e (spontaneous ink painting derived from Zen practice),but he also became a kind of informal therapist for the faculty.He was, among other things, a tea master, and when Watts andLois were becoming intolerably harassed by administrative prob-lems he would wander into their office and suggest that they taketime out for tea. Then in Hasegawa's room, "where the enshrinedimage of the Buddha was a piece of driftwood that had originallybeen the lathe-turned leg of a very ordinary wooden chair," thethree of them would sit on the floor, and "with easy conversation,watch him spoon powdered green tea into a primitive Koreanrice-bowl, cover it with boiling water from a bamboo ladle, andthen whisk it into a potion which has been called 'the froth of theliquid jade'."? Lois used to say that one tea with Hasegawa wasworth fifteen visits to a psychiatrist.The friendship between Watts and Hasegawa went deep. When,

a few years later, Hasegawa died of cancer, Watts unofficially be-came guardian to his daughter Sumire, acting as confidant andadviser. Because of the calm and wisdom of Hasegawa, Watts also

The longing to write that had helped precipitate Watts's resigna-tion from the academy soon found expression in a new book-

method without ulterior motive, an action performed, like all Zenactions -like eating, or walking, or shitting, or yawning - forits own sake. As always with Watts, the thing that matters mostis getting rid of the subjective distinction between "me" and "myexperience," the painful dualistic split: "The individual, on theone hand, and the world, on the other, are simply the abstractlimits or terms of a concrete reality which is 'between' them, as thecoin is 'between' the surface of its two sides."

By 1956 Watts realized that he could not make the academy workfinancially and that he was becoming bored with academic andadministrative life. Dorothy was perpetually angry with him, withgood reason, and with some idea of making a fresh start with herhe decided to take up the free-lance life. Although she supportedhim in his resolve to work independently, he felt that she wasputting pressure on him "to suburbanize myself, to live a moreordinary life, to mow the lawn, play baseball with the children,and abandon my far-out bohemian friends." The return to the jobwilderness was not without pain. There was again the sense offailure, "voices from the past echoing in my skull: Alan, why can'tyou be like everyone else? Why are you so weird? Why don't youCome down to earth and face reality?"!" But all the same, in thespring of 1957 he resigned from the academy (which tottered onfor a year or two before collapsing) and thenceforward wouldearn his living as a writer and as a peripatetic teacher, lecturer,broadcaster, philosopher, and entertainer. Meanwhile, Dorothyhad given birth to another child, Richard.

143The Wisdom of InsecurityZEN EFFECTS

took to wearing a kimono and found it much more comfortablethan formal Western clothing.The influence of the academy had brought Watts full circle

back to his early passion for Zen. In 1956 he wrote The Way ofZen (published the next year), perhaps his most famous book,and dedicated it to "Tia, Mark and Richard who will understandit all the better for not being able to read it." (Richard was theWatts's newborn baby.) It covered some of the same ground asThe Spirit of Zen, written twenty years before, but it had thebenefit of all the Chinese studies he had worked at since.In his preface he says firmly that he does not want to get him-

self labeled as a "Zenist or even as a Buddhist, for this seems tome to be like trying to wrap up and label the sky.?"It is more thathe wants Western readers to take pleasure in Zen, to enjoy its artand its literature, and to borrow any ideas that might be of serviceto them in leading their own lives. He longs to see Westerners givethe same respect to the "peripheral mind" as they do to consciousintelligence, and part of that process is to go back to the Taoistbeliefs, which preceded Zen Buddhism, with their clear certaintythat "the natural man is to be trusted."The freedom that lies in Zen is the discovery that we deny our

own freedom by determinedly manufacturing our own ego, withall its attendant problems, from moment to moment. "Man isinvolved in karma when he interferes with the world in such away that he is compelled to go on interfering, when the solutionof a problem creates still more problems to be solved, when thecontrol of one thing creates the need to control several others."The remedy is an "insight and awakening" that suggests an alter-native, a way to get off the roundabout. "Sitting" meditation isnot a spiritual exercise, it is simply "the proper way to sit," a

Nature, Man and Woman. It discussed the duality of mind andbody that Christian spirituality had so often unconsciously encour-aged. In the Western tradition woman was often depicted as"Eve," the temptress leading men away from God into sin; byprojection she had become synonymous with "the flesh" or "thebody," and sexuality itself was seen as a regrettable lapse intoweakness for those who had not the strength and determinationto be celibate.Warts believed that a new approach to sexuality could trans-

form it. Neither man nor woman had to be seen as a lonely abstractentity wandering like an orphan through the world. Rather, eachshould be considered part of the very fabric or expression of theworld, so love-making becomes one part of nature recognizinganother part, while also recognizing that other part as itself.One problem, he said, was that we are afraid to let go of the

"chronic cramp of consciousness," the narrowed, serial thinking,the memory-stored stream of impressions that give us a sense of"ego," which gives us the feeling that we are, as it were, the driverof the machine. But the same ego inflicts upon us an awkwardloneliness, a self-consciousness, a separateness that inhibits joy.We need, Watts thinks, to recognize that the ego is no more thana convenient fiction, to learn an awareness that is diffuse andcomprehensive rather than sharp and selective, and to discoverthat there is no longer the "duality of subject and object, experi-encer and experience. There would simply be a continuous, self-moving stream of experiencing, without the sense either of anactive subject who controls it or of a passive subject who suffersit. The thinker would be seen to be no more than the series ofthoughts, and the feeler no more than the feelings."!'Such an outlook makes possible a spontaneity of feeling, where

In the spring of 1958 Watts was invited to Zurich to give lecturesat the C. G. Jung Institute. It was his first visit to Europe since hehad left England as a young man twenty years before. Photographsshow him still slim and youthful looking at forty-three, with ashort haircut.En route he went back to Chislehurst. He enjoyed visiting the

the "organism is no longer split into the natural animal and thecontrolling ego. The whole being is one with its own spontaneityand feels free to let go with utmost abandon. Pain, which we havebeen taught to avoid, and pleasure, which we have learned to

seek, become indistinguishable in orgiastic response. Shame, onthe other hand, is part of the frightened opposition of the consciouswill, the ego, to that which it cannot conrrol.t'"After writing at length of the release of feeling and of ecstasy,

Watts goes on to look at the relation between man and woman.For Watts the union of two lovers is the overcoming of maya,

the illusion of duality and separateness. Without fear, shame, ordesperate need for gratification, the two gain a glimpse of a real,rather than an ideal, vision of how things are. Their vision, notjust of each other, but of the world, can be transformed: "Sexualcontact irradiates every aspect of the encounter, spreading itswarmth into work and conversation outside the bounds of actual'love-making'." Within love-making duality may be overcome:"At a particular but unpredetermined moment they may take offtheir clothes as if the hands of each belonged to the other. Thegesture is neither awkward nor bold; it is the simultaneous expres-sion of a unit beneath the masks of social roles and proprieties ....There is not the slightest compulsion to assume a pretended char-acrer.'?"

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cottage with the enormous garden he had loved as a little boy, andChislehurst itself was still the same small country town surroundedby woods, ponds, and common land. There were still the sameadvertisements printed on sheets of metal at Chislehurst station -for Stephens' ink and Palethorpe's sausages - the old high streetcontained the same sweet shop, the chemist's shop still run by thesame owners, and he could still walk across the green and roundby the ancient church for a drink with his father at the Tiger'sHead. Even the vegetables grown by his parents had the samedelicious taste that he remembered from the past - twenty yearsof heavy smoking had not completely spoiled his taste buds.Despite the delights he had mixed feelings about being back in

England. He had always enjoyed the company of Laurence, nowretired from business. But Emily, despite her love and care forhim, still filled him with ambivalence, the more distressing sincemost of his relatives considered her very lovable and could notunderstand the emotions she aroused in him. He could only reflectthat he had always felt that she hated her own body, felt cold tohim, and had seemed physically unattractive for as far back as hecould remember; he felt a fear in her presence and a sense of theimpossibility of living up to her expectations.England itself, after so long an absence, also felt like a chilly

mother. It was peaceful, but weary, obsessed with its imperial past.He spoke in Cambridge at the invitation of the Departments ofTheology, Anthropology and Oriental Studies and found them adull and unimaginative audience. He felt hurt that none of hisbooks seemed to be read much in his native country.He went to London and lunched with Christmas Humphreys

and D. T. Suzuki, both of them his boyhood mentors at the Bud-dhist Society, and he had his photograph taken with the pair of

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them, looking, beside the parncran High Court judge and thetwinkling little Japanese, a rather ambiguous figure not quite athis ease, neither solidly British anymore, nor unequivocallyAmerican.Zurich, somewhat to his surprise, turned out to be much more

fun. Watts talked about the Hindu doctrine of maya, suggestingthat the illusion of duality arose not from the evidence of thesenses but from our mistaken concepts. The mystic, or enlightenedperson, lived in the same natural world as everyone else but saw itdifferently. He had got past the riddle of duality and regardedhimself not as separate from the rest of the world but as part of it.Watts enjoyed the audience, composed partly of the young

studying to be psychotherapists and partly the company of "elderly,refined, and extremely well-educated ladies of formidable appear-ance who set the tone of the Insriture."!' He felt, however, that herather blotted his copybook by going about Zurich with a youngwoman, called Sonya, a former patient who had been abandonedby the Jungians as hopelessly psychotic.The high spot of his visit was the trip out to jung's lakeside

home at Kiisnacht. The old man began with one of his favoritegambits, assuring Watts that he himself was not a Jungian, andthen the two of them got down to a subject of mutual interest-Oriental philosophy. They discussed the concept of the uncon-scious, Watts suggesting its similarity to the Mahayana Buddhistterm alaya-vijnana, the "store consciousness," which, like jung's"collective unconscious," was the origin of archetypal forms orimages. Watts also remembered how Suzuki had sometimes trans-lated the Japanese term mushin (no mind) as the unconscious,meaning by it a sort of aware unselfconsciousness.They went on to talk of the effects computers might have on

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human psychology and finished by discussing a pair of swans theycould see on the lake."Isn't it true,' Watts asked, "that swans are monogamous?"

Jung said that yes they were, but the odd thing about their firstmating was that they invariably began by picking a fight, whichwas resolved when they worked out the method of mating."Watts found Jung open, eager, without conceit, full of humor

and intellectual curiosity.

When Watts returned to the United States Nature, Man andWoman had just come out, and it was enthusiastically reviewed.There was, however, a sad irony in his publishing a book aboutsexual intimacy and the union of lovers. He and Dorothy were bynow barely on speaking terms; the experiences that had begun torelease him from his old sexual fears had mostly been with otherwomen. He had discovered that many desirable women found himattractive and lovable and that he could be a successful lover,neither awkward nor frightened, nor ashamed. Only at home didhe feel captive and wretched, emotions that he chose to blamemore and more on the suburban atmosphere of Mill Valley, wherehe had taken on the expenses of luxurious family life. Bitter thathe was not free to do as he wished, he complained that life at homewas like something out of Sunset magazine: "picture windows ofthe ranch-type house, the outdoor barbecue, the children playingball on the lawn, the do-it-yourself projects of tiling the bathroomand putting up shelves, and the station-wagoning of loads of sun-browned and quarrelsome papooses and brats to picnics on thebeaches or marshmallow roasts in state parks."!"

In 1959 Gary Snyder returned from Kyoto and borrowed a logcabin from a friend in Homestead Valley, in walking distance of

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Watts's home. At once the two men resumed the friendship begunat the academy. Snyder took out one of the walls of his cabin, putin an altar stone, and made a small zenda. Watts, with otherfriends, came over two or three nights a week to sit zazen. FromDecember I to R they sat rohatsu sesshin (a winter marathon ofzazen) together.On New Year's Eve, Snyder was invited to a party at Mill

Valley given by Watts and Dorothy. Snyder liked Dorothy-hethought her intelligent, clear, and cool; she ran the household onorderly and immaculate lines and seemed a good mother. He ob-served, however, that she and Alan did not behave like a couple.Watts was out most evenings at parties alone and seemed de-tached from home and family. It struck him that \X!atts wasstill very much part of the affluent bourgeois life, often formallydressed, refusing marijuana when it was passed to him at parties."He had not yet," Snyder decided, "shifted gears into counter-culture."Watts was, in fact, in the agonizing dilemma of those who know

that their marriage is a disaster, but who have not quite summonedthe courage and strength needed for separation and divorce. Wattsnow had four children by Dorothy - Tia, Mark, Richard, andLila - in addition to Joan and Ann. He knew that his incomewas and would remain uncertain, that Dorothy would, naturallyenough, expect substantial financial guarantees in the event of adivorce, and that would mean that, however hard he worked, hewould be a poor man. As painful as any of these worries was thesense of being once again a failure. "He was one," Snyder remarksmildly, "who sowed problems wherever he went."Watts wrote about the problem later, in self-justifying terms:

It is well known that - for men especially- the forties are a"dangerous" decade, because if they have been well brought up, it

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takes them this long to realize that one sometimes owes it to otherpeople to be selfish.... Dutiful love is invariably, if secretly, re-sented by both partners to the arrangement, and children raised inso false an atmosphere are done no service.... Permanence mayfairly be expected of marriages contracted and families raised underthe ancient system of parental arrangements for then the partnersare not required to feel romantic love for each other. But modernmarriage involves the impossible anomaly, the contradiction interms of basing a legal and social contract on the essentially mysticaland spontaneous act of falling in love. The partners to such follyare sometimes lucky, and that is the best that can be said for it.They may sometimes become wise in the ways of the human heartby suffering each other, but such wisdom may also be learned in aconcentration carnp.!"

Watts was spending nearly all of his time away from home andwas drinking heavily, vodka mostly. In The Wisdom of Insecurityhe had written poignantly of the plight of the alcoholic:

In very many cases he knows quite clearly that he is destroyinghimself, that for him, liquor is poison, that he actually hates beingdrunk, and even dislikes the taste of liquor. And yet he drinks. For,dislike it as he may, the experience of not being drunk is worse.It gives him the "horrors" for he stands face to face with the un-veiled, basic insecuriry of the world. Herein lies the crux of themarrer. To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to under-stand it. To understand it, you must not face it bur be it.1s

The "horror" had moved closer to Watts since he had writtenthose words, nearly ten years before.Ironically he was increasingly in demand as a broadcaster,

seminar speaker, and lecturer, gaining a reputation all over thecountry as someone who could tell people how to live. He triedto insist that he was a "philosophical entertainer," "in show biz,"

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"a genuine fake," and an "irreducible rascal," perhaps to help himendure the sense of hypocrisy that his fame gave him, but most ofhis listeners were no more than mildly puzzled by such statements,perhaps thinking them a sign of a rare sort of humility.Watts was doing a lot of teaching in New York. In the late

fifties Charlotte Selver was giving remarkable seminars there onbodily awareness, using techniques to teach people to notice theirown bodies and to be more acutely aware of the world aroundthem, and she and Watts began to teach together in a particularlylively series of seminars. One student at these seminars in 1960,a woman of around Watts's own age, was Mary Jane Yates-Jano, as she liked to be called - and gradually she and Wattsstarted to see a lot of one another. Together they drank and dinedin Greenwich Village, exploring the small shops that then houseda number of craftsmen selling their wares. Before long Wattsbegan to fall in love with her.Jano hailed originally from Wyoming. She had been the first

woman reporter on the Kansas City Star and had worked for someyears in New York as Mobil's chief public relations officer. Shewas interested in many things that interested Watts, particularly inTaoism and Zen. He was, he says, fascinated by

her voice, her gestures, the humor of her eyes, her knowledge ofpainting, of music, of colors and textures, her skill in the art of theloveletter and her general embodiment of something I had beenlooking for all down my ages to be my chief travelling companion.o 0 • My first idea was to whisk her off to a lonely shack by thePacific, where we could sit on foggy nights by a log fire and talkover a bortle of red wine.l"

So Watts left his family. The saddest feature of this desertionwas that Dorothy was once again pregnant; in one of those painful

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He dances - free form -like a maniac, and his shrieks of delightcan be heard all over the hill."22 Elsa Gidlow was a gifted land-scape gardener and a poet who made no secret of the fact that sheloved women more than men.In the late 1950S, Elsa, Roger, and Roger's wife found a beau-

tiful and secluded site in a eucalyptus grove on Mount Tamalpais,and they planned to build houses and landscaped gardens therefor themselves and for a few friends. They called it Druid Heightsand had already invited Watts and his family to join them there.Only Dorothy's disapproval and dislike of Elsa had prevented thisfrom happening.Now, with his new sense of freedom, Watts found himself fre-

quently visiting them. Perhaps because Elsa offered no sexual chal-lenge, Watts enjoyed her as a comforting and sympathetic eldersister, or maybe as a sort of white witch, practicing her good magic.He liked watching her choosing herbs from her garden or talkingto her cats. Roger encouraged a kind of freedom and unselfcon-sciousness Watts had never known before. In Somers's beautifulJapanese-style room, with its Buddhist household shrine and itsgold and redwood walls, the two men played drums, or practiceda sort of freedom singing, or chanted, or danced. Watts remembersit as the discovering of a yoga, a joining with the energy of theuniverse, and as such, a sort of religious exercise.In New York, too, in the Greenwich Village loft of jazz musi-

cian Charlie Brooks (soon to be the husband of Charlotte Selver)Watts found himself breaking free of his old inhibitions. "So itwas," he says simply, "that I found a new self." It was as if he hadlearned something quite new about being close to people. "I foundmyself among people who were not embarrassed to express theirfeelings, who were not ashamed to show warmth, exuberance andearthy joie de vivre . . . . I found too that these friends had always

152

episodes of attempted reconciliation or seduction that sometimescome right at the end of an unhappy marriage, she had again con-ceived. So Watts was leaving the comfortable suburban house, apregnant wife, and four children. "At the age of forty-five I brokeout of ... this wall-to-wall trap, even though it was a hard shockto myself and all concerned. But I did it with a will and thusdiscovered who were my real friends."20Among those who experienced the "hard shock" were Watts's

parents in England. Brought up in a very different age, they hadbeen shocked enough when Alan and Eleanor parted. They foundthe circumstances of this second failure deeply distressing; Lau-rence, usually a rather overadmiring father, wrote a sympatheticletter to Dorothy when she gave birth to her youngest child, Diane,after Watts had left, saying that he regarded Alan as a failure asa husband and father.Watts's justification for his "breaking out" was that he felt

himself stifled emotionally: "I had been slipping into the emo-tional constipation peculiarly characteristic of genteel academia -the mock modesty, the studied objectivity, the cautious opinion,and the horror of enthusiasm.'?"Not only with Jano but also with one or two close friends Watts

began to enjoy an emotional warmth of which he had not believedhimself capable. Two of these friends were Roger Somers andElsa Gidlow. Somers was a jazz musician and an architect-carpenterof great brilliance and originality, who had come to the Bay Areafrom a puritanical Midwest background and had gradually discov-ered himself as a joyful pagan. "He is an incarnation of the Greekgod Pan," Watts wrote of him enthusiastically, "if you can imaginePan based on a bull instead of a goat .... For his physique is for-midable, his grizzly hair sticks out like short horns, and his energyis endless. He plays the saxophone, the oboe and all kinds of drums.

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considered me a little disrant and difficulr ro know, and had chari-rably put it down to British reserve.'?"Elsa made it possible for Watts to realize his fantasy of an idyll

with Jano. She owned a lonely cottage on another part of MountTamalpais, which she lent to them. In the cottage and in thegarden that Elsa had made they rediscovered a childhood worldlost by adulr busyness and responsibility. They looked together at

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Nine

Counterculturethe convolution of a leaf, the light in a drop of water, the shadowsof a glass in the sun, patterns of smoke, grain in wood, mottle inpolished stone ... we slowed down time. We watched the sunblazing from a glass of white wine and watered the garden at sun-set, when the slanting light turns flowersand leaves into bloodstoneand jade. We studied the forms of shells and ferns, crystals andteaze!s, water-flow, galaxies, radiolaria, and each other's eyes, andlooked down through those jewels to the god and the goddess thatmay be seenwithin even when the doubting expressionon the faceis saying "What, me?"We danced to Bach and Vivaldi and listenedto Ravi Shankar taking hold of the primordial sound of the uni-verse and rippling it with his fingers into all the shapes, patternsand rhythms of nature."

Going down to the sea and hunting for sand dollars at StinsonBeach, wandering the lonelier paths of Mount Tamalpais, lookingand talking and making love in Elsa's cottage, they were slowlydiscovering each other and themselves.

1960-1968

CALIFORNIA. San Francisco. 1960. Something new could befelr in the air. Later, journalists and social commentators foundwords for it. Utopianism, radical divergence, revolution, religiousrevival, San Francisco Renaissance, counterculture - each caughta bit of the action, without successfully describing the whole.Looking back, a decade later, Alan Watts perceived that "some-

thing was on the way, in religion, in music, in ethics and sexuality,in our attitudes to nature, and in our whole style of life. We tookcourage and we began to swing."!The roots of the counterculrure were Eastern religion - partic-

ularly Buddhism - jazz, poetry, the "alternative reality" of psy-chedelic drugs, and perhaps behind that the transcendental tradi-tion. A major preoccupation was the relation of the individual selfto his or her surroundings; how was the lonely and alienated selfto find release? Gestalr therapy, owing a great deal to Buddhistinsights, and other kinds of therapy, such as the encounter group,vied with various religious disciplines to offer an answer.The swift movement towards counterculrure coincided with the

I would hear him hammering and rustling about in the studio. Alittle after eight I would often light a cigar and wander over forcoffeewith him.... Even at this hour there would be others at thetable - his current mistresses,or young men helping him with boatconstruction; and as the day wore on a stream of visitorswould bein and out - diplomars, professors, ballerinas, fishermen, piratesand models- for hour after hour of multilingual badinage. Bylunchtime there were jugs of wine, jack cheese, and sourdoughbread on the table, and towards evening Yanko would get togetherlamb or fish with olive and peppers, vine leaves and lemons, egg-

favorite subjects were women and "The Celestial City," visions ofwhich ran through all his work.He lived with enormous joie de vivre, a joy that attracted all

kinds of visitors to the Vallejo. "In the fifties," said the PacificSun, "Varda was sporting strawberry-colored pants and drivingthrough Sausalito in a purple car. He would sometimes wear mis-matched socks. 'Why limit yourself?' he would say in his high-pitched Greek-accented voice. And people loved him. He wasalways surrounded by young, desirable women. All who knew himswear he was a romantic, not a lecher. Each person who enteredhis life felt beautiful, wanted, special."4 Varda's pleasure in livingwas derived from his gift for living in the moment.On Sundays there were wonderful sailing trips on board the

Perfidia, Yanko's lateen-sailed dhow, which often had a crew ofwomen and was "supplied with loaves and cold chicken and gal-lons of wine.:" The boat had no engine and was often in dangerof running aground because of the insobriety of the crew, but itsurvived, maybe because of the great eye on the prow, put there,Greek fashion, to avert the "evil eye." There were parties on neigh-boring beaches or aboard the Vallejo itself.On weekdays both Watts and Varda rose and began work early.

"As I sat at my typewriter," wrote Watts,

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radical change in Watts's private life when he left Dorothy. Wattshad a new sense of hope, as did many in the counterculture, thatthese social changes would bring a new freedom. The first steptoward this freedom was going with Jano to live on an old ferry-boat called the Vallejo ("a dilapidated old hulk") moored atgate 5 in Sausalito in 1961. Nothing could have plunged Wattsso successfully into a new bohemian world. The boat was ownedby a painter, Gordon Onslow-Ford, who had already let half of itto another painter, Jean Varda, one of the most colorful charactersof the waterfront. Instead of becoming exasperated by Varda orenvying the ease of his social contacts, particularly with women,Watts in fact admired and enjoyed him immensely, using him, ashe had used other admired friends, as a model of the SOrtof personhe would like to be himself. Varda seemed to him to be "a mar-vellous amalgamation of exuberation, sensuality, culture, andliteracy, salted with that essential recognition of one's own rascalitywhich is the perfect preservation against stuffiness and lack ofh ' ..2umarury.One of the things Watts admired about Varda was that he was

poor and preferred it that way - he said it led to less bother withthe tax people. (Struggling to pay alimony on a free-lance incomeWatts needed the example of someone who seemed to meet pov-erty with a light heart.) With Varda, or Yanko, as he was alwaysknown (the Greek word for uncle), there was always wine, goodfood, and marvellous company. Yanko held court in his big pea-cock chair "at the end of a long table scratched and stained withthe memories of innumerable banquets of minced lamb in vine-leaves, stuffed peppers, and fish cooked in herbs and wine."8Varda had arrived in California from Greece in 1940 and

settled first at Big Sur. A painter by training, he was already lessinterested in painting than in mosaics, collages, and sculpture madeout of whatever material came to hand - pipes, bottles, cans. His

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ing wine, and "giving out little wows and yesses of approval andeven whole sentences of comment with nobody's invitation but inthe general gaiety nobody's disapproval either.?"There was a lot of interest in Zen Buddhism among the beats,

the most enthusiastic exponent being Gary Snyder, already a closefriend of Watts.Jack Kerouac, who had written the influential book On the

Road, a beat generation odyssey that had sent many young peopletraveling around the country on freight trains, fell under Snyder'sspell and wrote a new book about their friendship and aboutBuddhism titled The Dharma Bums (1958). The two main char-acters in the novel, Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder, take part in wild,wonderful, drunken parties round bonfires, in which many of theguests take off their clothes for the pleasure of walking aroundnaked. They believe that to live in poverty, religious belief, andjoyful sexuality is the way to overcome the consumer society.The Dharma Bums and On the Road, along with Watts's writ-

ing, gave the young a new ideal, as well as the ideas and wordsof a religion that seemed more exotic and exciting than theirnative Christianity.Watts observed Kerouac's brand of Zen with a certain amount

of doubt and suspicion, feeling that it mistook sloppy, undisciplinedart, selfishness of all kinds, and idleness for spontaneity. Wattswas, however, careful to exempt Snyder from his strictures.Kerouac, for his part, obliquely mocked Watts, whom he knew

from parties and poetry readings as well as in print. Watts appearsin The Dharma Bums as Arthur Whane. He arrives at a party atwhich most of the guests have chosen to be naked.

Whane stands there in the firelight, smartly dressed in suit andnecktie, having a perfectly serious discussion about world affairswith two naked men."Well, what is Buddhism?" someone asks him. "Is it fantastic

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plant and onions ... mixing salad in an immensewooden bowl. ...All the while he would regale us with anecdotes,real and imaginary,and outrageous commentaries on art, women, nautical adventures."

What Yanko so effortlessly lived, Watts had spent years tryingto understand, to explain, in books, articles, and talks on radiostation KQED. His quarrel with Christianity was that it did notbelieve that "the natural man is to be trusted." Its emphasis on thewill, together with the continual need to watch oneself and to curbthe lusts of the flesh, seemed to him to heighten the human pre-dicament, the "hard knot" of the mind seeking to know the mind,or the self seeking to control the self. Continually watching oneselfmade one lonely and also encouraged a kind of hallucination-that the self was real. "When that tense knot vanishes there is nomore sense of a hard core of selfhood standing over against therest of the world."!Watts had explored this idea at length in Nature, Man and

Woman (1958), suggesting that the split between mind and bodythat Christianity inherited from Greek dualism, had affected allsubsequent attitudes toward women, since fears about the waywardflesh or body were often projected upon women. With both tender-ness and realism Watts was trying to explore new ways in whichmen and women might relate to one another.Many of these ideas about Zen Buddhism and about sensuality

had been explored before Watts by the group known as the beats,or the beat generation. The poets of North Beach, San Francisco,had often gathered in the early 1950S to drink and read poetry. Inthe spring of 1955, many of them met at the Six Gallery - GarySnyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Whalen, Michael McLure, Law-rence Ferlinghetti, and others - and there Allen Ginsberg readhis poem Howl, a devastating attack on contemporary society de-livered by a man with the temperament of an Old Testamentprophet. Jack Kerouac sat on the side of the tiny platform, drink-

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imagination, magic of the lightning flash, is it plays, dreams, noteven plays, dreams?""No, to me Buddhism is getting to know as many people as pos-

sible,"And there he was going round the patty real affable shakinghands with everybodyand chatting, a regular cocktail parry."

The vision that Watts, Snyder, and Kerouac shared was the re-nunciation of the values of bourgeois and suburban life. In 1962Herbert Marcuse was to claim in the preface to Eros and Civiliza-tion that there is a kind of revolution that breaks out not in hope-less poverty, but at the very heart of affluence. Freed from acuteanxiety about survival, human beings begin to ask more of life,and in particular they ask about meaning, in work, in relationships,in society, and in religion. It was to the search for this kind ofmeaning that the contemporary historian Theodore Roszak ap-plied the term counterculture in 1968, a word that was widelytaken up and used.In 1960, when Watts and his contemporaries "began to swing,"

Kennedy had just been elected president and there was a feelingof hope and newness in the air, of the possibility of new movestoward peace and racial integration, an intoxicating sense thatthings could be different. Kennedy championed civil rights, hadtalks with Martin Luther King about racial problems, seemed to

show a new initiative toward the Soviet Union, enjoyed and en-couraged the arts. Idealism with style offered a way forward.On the college campuses this idealism took the form of a radical

activism that seemed more colorful and less grim than the old-styleMarxism; students rather than the working classes were to be thenew agents of change. Folk music, hitherto associated with ruralsettings and traditional themes of love and death, began to beadopted by urban idealists who gradually adapted it to expressother passionately held sentiments about brotherly love, peace, andracial equality.

He didn't prepare. He had a fine library, of course, and he didextensive research for his books, but for his lectures? No way. Hewould just wander into an auditorium someplace- some collegetown. He'd walk up on the stage, and he'd say, "Let's see, today wewere going to discuss,say,Ramakrishna." Right away, some totallybrilliant opening would suggest itself to him, he'd gather up theaudiencewith some incredible beginning which would draw peoplein. There'd be this long, rambling middle, which would keep peo-

161Counterculture

One of the most profound differences between the college gen-eration of the sixties and their parents' generation had to do withsexuality. The earlier generation, lacking effective contraceptivesand still firmly in the grip of a Christian ethic that believed "forni-cation" to be a sin, had officially held to the ideal of sexualityexpressed only within monogamous marriage. The young, how-ever, took their models from such books as The Dharma Bums,in which, for example, Japhy Ryder and a friend, sharing thedelectable girl they call Princess in what she calls yabyum, rolldelightedly on the floor in sexual ecstasy. They were repudiatingthe America that Japhy Ryder remembered from when he was a"kid," the America of the Protestant work ethic, of nervous liquorlaws, of censorious attitudes toward sensual experience, and ofdevotion to the ideal of the family.Watts was speaking - about sexuality, about sensuality, about

religion, about psychedelics, about food, about clothing, about howto live - on campuses all over the United States, and weekly onthe radio. In 1961 he spoke at Columbia, Harvard, the YaleMedical School, Cornell, Chicago, and at other schools, and gaveseminars on the Vallejo and elsewhere. He was the sort of speakerwho used his voice as consciously as a pianist uses his fingers.Sandy Jacobs, who was later to record Watts extensively on tape,remembers the way he captured an audience and how effortless itseemed.

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ple's interest- jokes, laughs. He had a mental watch which said,"Hey! It's fiftyminutes," and he'd draw it all in, and come up withthis cliffhanger, a conclusion,bur it was a pregnant moment whereeverybodywould say, "God, that's fantastic!"

In 1962 Watts received a two-year travel and study fellowshipfrom Harvard University's Department of Social Relations, andhe began a series of visits to Harvard. Here he began to see quitea lot of Timothy Leary, whom he already knew slightly. Leary hadturned his house into a sort of commune, in which all kinds ofpeople gathered in the kitchen for meals and conversation. Watts,always fastidious in his personal habits, said later that he couldnot understand how anyone who had had his or her consciousnessraised by psychedelic drugs could tolerate the squalor of the Learyhousehold - the unswept floors and the unmade beds. Messinessapart, though, he liked Leary; later he was surprised when Learyproved to have a genius for getting into trouble that even exceededhis own.Leary too remembered the evenings in his kitchen when

the wizard held court, drinking heavily, spinning out tales of fabledconsciousnessexpanders of the past. [Watts talked of MadameBlavatsky, Annie Besant, Krishnamurti, and Gurdjieff.} ... Hegave us a model of the gentleman-philosopher who belonged tono bureaucracy or academic institution. He had published moreinfluential books than any Orientalist of our time. Although hecould teach rings round any tenured professor, he had avoidedfaculty status, remaining a wandering independent sage, supportinghimself with the immediate fruits of his plentiful brain.... Wattstaught us to divide mystics inca two groups - the lugubrious andthe wirry.'?

Watts was to participate in Leary's life at intervals thereafter,once coming to a pagan festival Leary held to celebrate the vernalequinox at Millbrook. There was a huge bonfire, and the congre-

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gation sat in a candlelit circle while Watts consulted the I Ching.Watts, Leary says, probably admiringly, "whose orientation waspast and Eastern rather than scientific and Western, used theI Ching as an elegant mumbo-jumbo tea ceremony, which raisedthe esthetic level of our gathering and made us feel part of anancient tradition."!'Leary and Watts were each, in different ways, to affect people's

use and understanding of drugs, but ahead of either of them in ex-ploring this territory was Aldous Huxley. In 1953, at the invita-tion of a psychologist conducting research, Huxley took mescalin,a natural drug that, like the synthetic drug lysergic acid, haschemical similarities to human adrenalin."One bright May morning," wrote Huxley in The Doors of

Perception, "I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalindissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for results."Within an hour Huxley, a man who on his own admission had apoor visual imagination, was looking at something utterly ex-traordinary. A flower vase on the table containing a rose, a carna-tion, and an iris, which had interested him briefly at breakfast,became the focus of his attention: "I was not looking now at anunusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seenon the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment bymoment, of naked existence.'Is it agreeable?' somebody asked....'Neither agreeable nor disagreeable' I answered. 'It just is.' "The "Is-ness" (lstigkeit) of which Meister Eckhart had spoken

- the Being of Plato - suddenly Huxley saw it in the flowers."A transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing thatWas at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, uniquepatticulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evidentparadox, was to be seen the divine source of all exisrence.t'PAll the hints and painful attempts at explanation that Huxley

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had read in the mystical literature suddenly made sense. This waswhat the beatific vision was like, or Sat Chit Ananda (Being-Awareness-Bliss). And when the Zen novice asked his masterwhat the dharma-body of the Buddha was like (dharma is thedoctrine or method by which freedom is attained), he got thebaffling answer "The hedge at the bottom of the garden." Thiswas what the master saw.It began to seem to Huxley that the function of the human senses

and nervous system was to filter out the extraordinary wealth ofinformation constantly available to it in order to enable the in-dividual to deal with simpler necessities. But potentially, and inour earliest baby awareness of the world, each of us is, has been,Mind at Large, aware of everything, remembering everything.Mystics, schizophrenics, and those under the influence of suchdrugs as mescalin, see life without the filter. Painters, Huxleythought, see that life in part.He emerged from this profound experience feeling that he had

seen into the deeps of contemplation and could at least imaginethe deeps of madness. He felt that contemplation demanded thatsomething be added to it (as the saints and bodhisattvas believed) ,some effort of active compassion that could release others fromsuffering. In Eckhart's phrase they should be ready to "come downfrom the seventh heaven in order to bring a cup of water to a sickbrother."Partly because of Huxley's experiment and his vivid description

of it, a wider group of people became interested in hallucinogens,such as mescalin, lysergic acid, psilocybin, and peyote. Anthropol-ogists who had long known about the tradition of taking cactuSbuds (peyote) and "the mushroom" (psilocybin) in Mexico andin some countries of South America among the Indian populationswere interested in the effect of drugs that had previously been

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used primarily as part of religious rituals. Psychologists wereinterested in the drugs for any light they might throw on thesubject of perception and for revelations they might produceabout schizophrenia. Religious people were interested in the infor-mation they might offer about mystical experience. Painters andmusicians were after new perceptions of light, color, form, andsound.In 1958 Watts, who, unlike the beats, had always been wary

of drugs, was invited to take part in an experiment by KeithDirrnan, the psychiatrist in charge of LSD (lysergic acid diethyl-amide) research in the Department of Neuropsychiatry at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles. One of the things that en-couraged him to do so was the way he thought that the mescalinexperience had made the ascetic Aldous Huxley warmer, morehuman. So he went along to Dirman's office and took one hundredmicrograms of LSD. Perception was changed in a fascinating way:time was slowed down, plants and grass and a church across theroad were all great marvels, and a book of sumi-e paintings was arevelation; yet he was faintly disappointed. It seemed to him thathe had had a wonderful aesthetic experience, but one that did notapproach the mystical unity that Huxley had described. Later hewas to believe that the clinical/laboratory atmosphere of a formaltest in a hospital had itself imposed certain limitations on his re-sponse, though it is also true that the dose is a small one.He let a year go by and then tried a series of five experiments

with the drug, varying the dosage from seventy-five to onehundred micrograms. These trips were extraordinarily rewarding.Perhaps the most remarkable effect had to do with time, whatWatts called "a profound relaxation combined with an abandon-ment of purposes and goals .... I have felt, in other words,endowed with all the time in the world, free to look about me as

if I were living in eternity without a single problem to be solved."Within this freedom was another astonishing freedom: "I was nolonger a detached observer, a little man inside my own head, havingsensations. I was the sensations .... It is like, not watching, butbeing, a coiling arabesque of smoke patterns in the air, or of inkdropped in water."!3 An irresistible feeling of beauty and wonder,absent from his first experiment with the drug, took over.Watts writes of one experiment conducted late at night at his

house in Millbrook:

Some five or six hours from its start the doctor had to go home, andI was left alone in the garden. For me, this stage of the experimentis always the most rewarding in terms of insight, after some of themore unusual and bizarre sensory effects have worn off. The gardenwas a lawn surrounded by shrubs and high trees - pine and euca-lyptus - and floodlit from the house which enclosed it on one side.As I stood on the lawn I noticed that the rough patches where thegrass was thin or mottled with weeds no longer seemed to be blem-ishes. Scattered at random as they were, they appeared to constitutean ordered design, giving the whole area the texture of velvetdamask, the rough patches being the parts where the pile of thevelvet is cut. In sheer delight I began to dance on this enchantedcarpet, and through the thin soles of my moccasins I could feel theground becoming alive under my feet, connecting me with the earthand the trees and the sky in such a way that I seemed to become onebody with mywhole surroundings.Looking up, I saw that the stars were colored with the same reds,

greens and blues that one sees in iridescent glass, and passing acrossthem was the single light of a jet plane taking forever to streak overthe sky. At the same time, the trees, shrubs, and flowers seemed tobe living jewelry, inwardly luminous like intricate structures ofjade, alabaster, or coral, and yet breathing and flowering with thesame life that was in me. Every plant became a kind of musicalutterance, a play of variations on a theme repeated from the mainbranches, through the stalks and twigs, to the leaves, the veins inthe leaves, and to the fine capillary network between the veins. Each

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new bursting of growth from a center repeated or amplified thebasic design with increasing complexity and delight, finally exultingin a flower.!"

The beauty of the experience reminded Watts insistently ofsomething, and he realized that the garden had the kind of exoticbeauty of the pictures in the Arabian Nights, of scenes in Persianminiatures or in Chinese and Japanese paintings. Those artists toohad seen the world like this. Was that because they too weredrugged and seeing therefore a strangely heightened and beautifiedversion of the world, or was it that the effect of LSD was "to re-move certain habitual and normal inhibitions of the mind andsenses, enabling us to see things as they would appear to us if wewere not so chronically repressedr":" What the Oriental artistssaw in their health and wisdom, Watts is saying, he could seewith the help of LSD.Inevitably Watts wondered about the possibilities of a drug so

potent. Writing in 1960 he says that "the record of catastrophesfrom the use of LSD is extremely low, and there is no evidence atall that it is either habit-forming or physically deleterious .... Ifind that I have no inclination to use LSD in the same way astobacco or wines and liquors. On the contrary, the experience isalways so fruitful that I feel I must digest it for some monthsbefore entering into it again."!" It was a drug, he goes on to say,to be approached with the care and dedication with which onemight approach a sacrament.He continued to experiment with it throughout the next couple

of years and achieved, in an experience with his friends at DruidHeights, a piercing sense of how very lonely he had felt all hislife, "a bag of skin," chronically and hopelessly cut off from allother "bags of skin" - "the quaking vortex of defended defensive-ness which is my conventional self." Sitting up on the ridgepole ofthe barn with Roger and his friends, laughing helplessly with them

at the sight of a broken car standing in Elsa's garden, sitting rounda table on the terrace, sharing homemade bread and wine, he hadthe most extraordinary intimation of peace, of having "returned tothe home behind horne.'?"This sense of being loved and cared for, of a place of deep trust,

made it possible for him to know what he called the "helpless cry-ing of the baby." The confident talker and performer and enter-tainer suddenly knew himself as an infinitely needy and sensitiveself, "a blithering, terrified idiot, who managed temporarily to puton an act of being self-possessed. I began to see my whole life asan act of duplicity - the confused, helpless, hungry and hideouslysensitive little embryo at the root of me having learned, step bystep, to comply, placate, bully, wheedle, flatter, bluff and cheatmy way into being taken for a person of competence andreliability. ,,18It was both a wonderful and an agonizing discovery, one that

raised even more interesting questions as to what this amazingdrug could achieve. Writing The Joyous Cosmology in 1962Watts had come to see drugs like LSD and mescalin as a kind ofmedicine for sick modern men that would give them the experienceof being "temporarily integrated." Like medicine, transformingdrugs were not, in his view, a way of life. You took them if youneeded them, you deepened the experience "by the various waysof meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful."In 1961 LSD was only just beginning to become available out-

side the medical world. Watts shared Huxley's feeling that it mightbe shared by minds already developed by aesthetic, philosophical,and religious ideas and practices. Unlike Huxley he guessed at thedanger of a widespread availability of LSD, fearing that it wouldproduce the chemical equivalent of bathtub gin. One of thereasons for writing The joyous Cosmology, Watts claimed, was to

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inform people about the drug while there was still time, to en-courage them to approach it with a kind of reverence, rather thanwith a desire simply for "kicks."In this he was entirely opposed by Timothy Leary. Leary came

relatively late to LSD, not actually trying it until 1962. But forseveral years before that he and Richard Alpert (a psychologist,who later became Ram Dass) had experimented extensively withpsilocybin and had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the psychologyfaculty at Harvard to set up a series of systematic drug experimentsthere. So instead Leary and Alpert worked with university staffmembers and volunteer students and their families. There were alot of volunteers.Partly because of a series of experiments involving use of

psilocybin by prisoners in the Massachusetts prison system, inwhich he found that he could make prisoners less depressed andhostile and more responsible and cooperative, Leary began to feelthat psychedelic drugs might have something to offer everyone,and he developed a kind of evangelical zeal to share his discoveries.He gave out mushroom pills freely, particularly to writers; RobertLowell, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, ArthurKoestler, and Allen Ginsberg all "took the mushroom" with Leary.He was following a tradition that the British philosopher Gerald

Heard and the psychologist Oscar Janiger had begun in the 1950Sof deliberately initiating people into LSD, believing that it wasGod's way of giving the twentieth century the gift of consciousnessand saving it from Armageddon. "When you made contact, it waslike two people looking at each other across the room, and with asort of nod of the head that acknowledged that you 'too!' "I. wroteLeary. Janiger had turned on a number of Hollywood film starsand directors, Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson, and Stanley Kubrickamong them. He had also run tests with people from many walks

The words hipster and hippie were coming into the language andwere applied to the new "far-out" crowd by the beats. By the endof 1965, in the words of a harassed police captain, "the word isout that San Francisco is the place for the far-out crowd," andwithin San Francisco the old student neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury had become the most far-out, both because of its cheap-

of life, a number of whom had felt illuminated and changed bythe LSD experience, aud he had had some encouraging resultsworking with depressed patients.The rumors of the effects of psychedelic drugs began to cause a

kind of excitement that boded ill for rhe sort of controlled initia-tion Huxley or Watts or Janiger favored. At Harvard Leary wascontinually being approached by students who wanted to tryLSD. When he obeyed college rules and refused to oblige them,they got supplies in Boston or New York. The chemistry srudentssynthesized their own. Leary described it this way: "In this thethird year of our research the Yard was seething with drug con-sciousness." Dozens of Harvard students had visions. Some droppedout and went to the East. "Not necessarily a bad development fromour point of view," Leary wrote with his usual insouciance, "butunderstandably upsetting to parents, who did not send their kidsto Harvard to become Buddhas." Worse still, "dozens of brightyouths phoned home to announce that they'd found God and dis-covered the secret of the universe.'?"In California, LSD, not yet illegal, was being widely distributed,

much of it synthesized by an entrepreneur named Stanley Owsley.Leary's Psychedelic Review disseminated information about meth-ods of taking it. Braver or wilder souls, like Ken Kesey, authorof One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, held rock-and-roll dancesin which the place of honor in the middle of the floor was given toa baby's bathtub full of punch spiked with lysergic acid.

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ness and because of the attractiveness of its Edwardian houses. Asif to fit in with the landscape many of the hippies starred wearingEdwardian and Victorian clothes - they were cheap and good tolook at during LSD trips or when stoned on marijuana.Golden Gate Park became a sort of extension of the neighbor-

hood, together with a handful of favorite stores and coffee housesthat stayed open all night. A professor opened an experimentalcollege in the Haight in which srudents could decide what theywanted to study, outline a course, get a faculty sponsor, and hirea teacher. There was a preponderance of people wanting to studyart, psychology, and occult religion.Street theatre became a common sight, and it mostly reflected

antiwar or antiracist sentiments. The new rock-and-roll, which,to begin with, was nor interested in much besides "love," wasgradually adopting antiestablishment ideas. Already by 1965many folkies were turning to the electric guitar and were singingsongs, like Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," that caughtthe new mood. The hippies listened to the new bands, like theJefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the Byrds, and to newsingers, like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. They admired theBeatles, but began by thinking them a bit "cozy." The bandsplayed against and within light shows in which their audiencedanced in the light of strobes, ultraviolet light, and overheadprojectors. Charles Perry describes a message displayed by pro-jector at one light show that went: "Anybody who knows he isGod go up onsrage!"The Haight was beginning to get into the drug market. By the

early sixties marijuana (once enjoyed mostly by Latins andworking-class blacks) had become popular on campuses, and by1963 people were smuggling it from Mexico. Most of the sellingwas done by hippies who found it a way of making a living. Ounces("lids") sold for eight to ten dollars, a kilogram at around sixty

took a day off for meditation at Nanzenji, not in the temple itself,but on the forested hillside behind it, where we sat on the steps ofsome ancient nobleman's tomb, supplying ourselveswith the kit forceremonial tea and a thermos bottle of hot sake. Zen meditation isa trickily simple affair, for it consists only in watching everythingthat is happening, including your own thoughts and your breathing,without comment. After a while, thinking, or talking to yourself,drops away and you find that there is no "yourself" other thaneverything which is going on, both inside and outside the skin.Your consciousness,your breathing, and your feelings are all thesame process as the wind, the rrees growing, the insects buzzing,

extensive know ledge of the country; installed in his monastery,Snyder sorted out accommodation and currency problems forWatts and gave him a welcome bolt-hole from the responsibilitiesof looking after his charges. Snyder was by this time advancedenough in Zen studies to be able to discuss some of the thingsWatts was curious about, such as what actually went on in thesilence of a Zen monastery, for example, and how the system wasstructured. Snyder introduced Watts to his roshi and to some ofthe head priests, and arranged for him to attend lectures at themonastery, as well as some of the ceremonies, which Watts enjoyedtremendously."I got to like him more and more, even though I realized he

was getting naughtier and naughtier," says Snyder. "Which wasall right because I was naughty too. So we enjoyed each other'scompany."Watts's spoken Japanese was poor - "only enough to direct

taxis and order food in restaurants, helped out with Chinesecharacters on a scratch-pad" - but he felt very at home in Japan,particularly in Kyoto. He visited temples and gardens, filled withwonder and joy, and was fascinated by all the rituals of tea, andby the shops with materials for "ink-and-brush meditation," apastime he had long enjoyed. One day he and Jano

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dollars. The hippies broke up the kilos and sold smaller amountsat a good profit.LSD was still legal (until October 1966), and the extraordinary

perceptions and fantasies, images and colors associated with itbegan to influence pop art, clothes, and songs. The Beatles' newalbum Revolver gave broad hints that the Beatles themselves were"turning on," while a new paper, the Oracle, with an amazing useof colored inks, exploded in a vast rainbow that included allhippie preoccupations in one great Whitmanesque blaze of lightand camaraderie. American Indians, Shiva, Kali, the Buddha, tarot,astrology, Saint Francis, Zen, and tantra all rubbed shoulders inone edition, one that sold fifty thousand copies on the streets.When the Oracle printed the Heart Sutra, it devoted a doublespread to the Zen Center version, complete with Chinesecharacters.There was, briefly, a touching kind of innocence about the

hippie movement. In the early days of Haight-Ashbury there wasa cafe on Eighth Street where people threw their spare change intoa tray so that those who could not afford the price of a cup ofcoffee or a meal could eat. There was a movement of peoplecalled "the Diggers," who handed out free meals to all who came,an action based on the ideology that food belonged to the people.Young people from all over the United States regarded SanFrancisco and the Haight as a mecca to be reached at all costs,and many of them received a free meal and a free bed before eitherreturning to home and school or joining the growing populationaround the Panhandle, the handle-shaped extension of GoldenGate Park.

During the years 1960 to 1965, Alan Watts visited Japan two orthree times a year, escorting tourists to Kyoto. He was helped withthe practical chores of tour guiding by Gary Snyder, who had

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the water flowing, and the distant prattle of the city.... The trick,which cannot be forced - is to be in this state of consciousnessallthe time, even when you are filling out tax forms or being angry."

In the grounds of one of the ruined temples, Jano and Watts, bynow married, served each other LSD, each pouring the liquid intothe other's tiny cup, as the Japanese serve sake.Watts's repeated visits to Kyoto brought an old acquaintance

back into his life, Ruth Sasaki, by now the abbess in the Rinzaisect of Zen. He and Ruth at this stage in their lives had a sort ofamused respect for one another.

He has approached his task with an impish willingness to be catchyand cute, and to play at philosophy as if it were an enjoyable game.It is a style easily mistaken for flippancy, and it has exposed him toa deal of rather arrogant criticism: on the one hand from elitist Zendevotees who have found him too discursive for their mystic tastes(I recall one such telling me smugly, "Watts has never experiencedsatori"), and on the other hand from professional philosopherswho have been inclined to ridicule him for his popularizing bent asbeing, in the words of one academic, "The Norman Vincent Pealeof Zen."22

You feel the world outside your body is an awful trap, full of ...people, who are sometimes nice to you but mostly aren't. They're allout for themselves like you are and therefore there's one hell of aconflict going on. The rest of it, aside from people, is absolutelydumb - animals, plants, vegetables and rocks. Finally, behind thewhole thing there are blazing centers of radioactivity called stars,and out there there's no air, there's no place for a person to live....We have come to feel ourselves as centers of very, very tender,sensitive, vulnerable consciousness, confronted with a world thatdoesn't give a damn about us. And therefore, we have to pick a fightwith this external world and beat it into submission to our wills. Wetalk about the conquest of nature; we conquer everything. We talkabout the conquest of mountains, the conquest of space, the con-quest of cancer, erc., etc. We're at war. And it's because we feelourselves to be lonely ego principles, trapped in, somebody inex-tricably bound up with a world that doesn't go our way unlesssomehow we can manage to force it to do SO.23

Roszak believed that, on the contrary, Watts's intellectual graspand achievement was real and solid; he was more interested insharing his ideas with the world at large than in reserving themfor a small academic circle.The charisma of Watts began to make him a revered figure in

the whole Bay Area. People who wanted to be his disciples or tohave their problems straightened out by him turned up unan-nounced at the Vallejo or insisted on telephoning him at all hoursof the day and night. There was a woman who came and knelt athis feet on one occasion when he was dining out at a San Franciscorestaurant. As a man who seemed to have answers, to know some-thing others didn't, he drew the lost, the worried, the depressed,and the seeking like a magnet. Watts's cheerful talks often beganfrom the proposition that his listener was in a sort of trap:

This way of looking at ourselves, Watts said, this view of theworld about us over against our own ego, is hallucinatory, a com-

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Watts's writing and speaking about Zen at public lectures andseminars, on tape and television, in books, and above all onpublic radio, gave him a strong influence on the hippie culture.He talked of what interested him - mystical experience, drugs,food, clothes, lifestyle, poverty and wealth, pacifism - and he didit brilliantly. Theodore Roszak remembers the fascination thesebroadcasts held for all sorts of people, and the way conversationwith friends the next morning often turned on "what Alan Wattssaid last night." He was struck by Watts's deep scholarship andby the courage of his efforts to translate the insights of Zen andTaoism into the language of Western science and psychology.

This way of looking at the ego, compounded with the insightsgained from taking LSD, chimed perfectly with the spirit of thecounterculture. The passion for transformation, for inner change,

You find that you can't really control your thoughts, your feelings,your emotions, all the processes going on inside you and outsideyou that are happening - there's nothing you can do about it. Sothen, what follows?Well, there's only one thing that follows: Youwatch what's going on. You see, feel, this whole thing happeningand then suddenly you find, to your amazement, that you can per-fectlywell get up, walk over to a table, pick up a glass of milk anddrink it.... You can still act, you can still move, you can still goon in a rational way, but you've suddenlydiscoveredthat you're notwhat you thought you were. You're not this ego, pushing and shov-ing things inside a bag of skin. You feel yourself now in a new wayas the whole world, which includes your body and everything thatyou experience,going along. It's intelligent. Trust it.24

pletely false conception of ourselves as (a favorite expression ofhis) "an ego inside a bag of skin."A truer way of looking at things, according to Watts, is to see

our own body, along with animal and plant life and everythingelse, as part of a natural environment in which we are all intimatelyconnected, human beings depending on air that is within a certainrange of temperatures, and on the nutrition that natural life pro-vides. People "go with" their environment, exactly as a bee goeswith a flower - neither bee nor flower could exist without theother.Watts regarded the ego, the need to think of ourselves obses-

sively as "I" and to build elaborate images about that persona, asan illusion - "an illusion married to a futility." The trouble is,in his view, you can't get rid of such a powerful illusion just bytrying; conscious effort, even effort aimed at losing the ego, onlyreinforces the condition. Sowhat is the answer?

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that was a central feature of the movement, had found a quasi-religious leader in Alan Watts. Describing himself as a "philo-sophical entertainer" and a "genuine fake," he had clearly and wellthought out things to say about many of the ttaditional constituentsof religion - about God, about the self, and about the self'srelationship to God and to fellow creatures.At the time some theologians were discussing the idea of the

"death of God." It was not, Watts suggested, God who was dying,but a particular way of thinking and talking about him that haddied "by becoming implausible." Watts suggested a return to theGod of the Theologia Mystica of Saint Dionysius, a God notlimited by our concepts, or our pitiful need for security. "Thehighest image of God is the unseen behind the eyes - the blankspace, the unknown, the intangible and the invisible. That is God!We have no image of that. We do not know what that is, but wehave to trust it. There's no alternative .... That trust in a Godwhom one cannot conceive in any way is a far higher form offaith than fervent clinging to a God of whom you have a definiteconceprion.?"Watts put some of his thinking about God into a new book,

The Two Hands of God (1963). It was a book about overcomingthe Western obsession with duality, the duality that separated theego so painfully from its environment; it explored the themes oflight and dark, life and death, good and evil, as well as Orientalimagery - the Cosmic Dance, the Primordial Pair, and legends ofdismemberment and resurrection.Next came Beyond Theology (subtitled The Art of God-

manship; 1964), a cheerfully naughty but carefully argued bookthat approaches Christianity with determined irreverence.

Perhaps I can best indicate the spirit and approach of this book byasking you to imagine that you are attending a solemn service in agreat cathedral, complete with candles, incense, chanting monks,

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and priests in vestments of whire, scarlet and shimmering gold.Suddenly someone pulls you by the sleeve and says, "Psst! Comeout back. I've got something to show you." You follow him out bythe west door, and then go around the building ... into the sacristyor vestry.This is the ecclesiasticalequivalent of rhe green room inthe theater, and you are about to enter bywhat, in a worldly setting,would be called the stage door. However, just outside you notice acouple of clerics- in their vestments-lighting up cigarettes."

Watts then transposed this scene to heaven and himself to therole of a kind of jester or fool at court, unmasking the solemnitythat surrounds the idea of God, debunking the crushing reverencethat makes it impossible to reason about some of the more bafflingstatements of Christianity. Watts returns to some favorite targets.How can an aU-powerful God permit the Devil, or evil, to be

at work in the world, unless he has somehow planted him thereto heighten the drama? Watts imagines God playing hide-and-seek with himself in the world, then forgetting that it is a gameand losing himself (in the person of his creatures) in scenes inwhich the drama gets altogether our of hand.Why are Christians sometimes declaring themselves to be gods

and sometimes insisting that they are terribly sinful? Why canthey not see that asceticism and eroticism are two sides of the samecoin? Their unwiUingness to see this, Watts suggests, exacts aterrible price in prudery, misery, and warped lives: "The game isjust too far-out.'>27Two years later, in a book caUed The Book: On the Taboo

Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts went back to his favoritethemes of ego and non-ego, of living in the moment, of spon-taneity, of ecstasy and the importance of living fully in the body,to repeat his favorite message - You are It. He was now movinginto Vedanta with Hindu concepts to make his points, but thepoints were much the same.

I could not have believed- even in 1960 - that, say, RichardHittleman, who studied with me at the Academy, would be con-ducting a national television program on yoga, that numerouscolleges would be giving courses on meditation and Oriental phi-losophy for undergraduates, that this country would be supportingthriving Zen monasteries and Hindu ashrams, that the I Chingwould be selling in hundreds of thousands, and that - wonder of

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Since his early experiments with LSD, his shared life with Vardaand Jano, his friendships at Druid Heights and elsewhere, and hisinvolvement with the counterculture as articulator and charis-matic leader, Watts had changed a good deal. According to GarySnyder, by about 1967, the summer of love as it was called, Wattshad become a full-scale flower child, as committed to the colorful,the experimental, the provisional, and the original as any campusdropout or high school runaway. His shyness, primness, and cor-rectness, eased by the warmth of the sixties climate, gave way toconfidence, pleasure in acclaim, flowing hair, and a wonderfulrange of garments, including a sort of chasuble made from hairymaterial which kept him warm in cooler weather, a Philippinesarong ("the most comfortable garment ever invented"), and theJapanese yucata in which he liked to work. (He was particularlyopposed to trousers for men, regarding them as "castrative.")Waves of counterculture, often carrying Watts's messages with

them, were washing around most of the \'Vestern world. Experi-mentation with psychedelics was widespread, not infrequently pro-ducing the sequence Timothy Leary had advised - "Turn On,Tune In, Drop Out" - and thousands of young people did justthat, abandoning study or regular employment, giving themselvesup to drugs or meditation, living as beggars. Others, not preparedto go to such extremes, nevertheless found their habits and outlookchanged. When he came to look back on this period some yearslater Watts still felt astonished at what had happened.

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wonders- sections of the Episcopal Church would be consultingme about contemplative retrears and the use of mantras in liturgy.

In October 1966, it became a misdemeanor to possess LSD orDMT in the state of California and a felony to sell them. They werewidely available, however, and the ban on them only increased theinterest in the drugs and their effects. In Berkeley a hillside thathigh school students had been in the habit of painting with thename of their school and their class year now bore the legend inhuge letters, LSD. The initials were also spelled out in a song,

A group of undergraduates stages a sit-in against naval recruitersar the Student Union. They are soon joined by a contingent of non-students whom the administrators then martyr by selective arrest.... Finally, the teaching assistants call a strike in support of themenaced demonstration. When at last the agitation comes to itsambiguous conclusion, a rally of thousands gathers outside SproulHall, the central administration building, to sing the Beatles'"Yellow Submarine"- which happens to be the current hit on allthe local high-school campuses."

181Counterculture

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," in the Beatles' new albumSgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).Life in the Haight had taken on a psychedelic quality in itself,

as Charles Perry says, "like a running Beaux Arts Ball. ... Peoplebrought things to share, such as food or Day-Glo paints withwhich to decorate each other's bodies or paint designs on the floor[the dance halls all had ultraviolet lights to make Day-Glo fluo-resce more brilliantly}. Or little toys: soap-bubble blowers, bells,convex mirrors, ... sparklers, yo-yos or pens that glowed in thedark."30 Stores flourished that had caught the new mood, withnames like Wild Colors, the Psychedelic Shop, Far Fetched Foods,the I/Thou Coffee Shop.

In January 1967 the counterculture staged what was to be itsbiggest show, the "Be-In," or "Human Be-In." It was held in thepolo field in the Park Stadium of San Francisco, and the day,January 14, was decided through consultation with an astrologer."Jerry Rubin told reporters the Be-In would show that hippiesand radicals were one, their common aim being to drop out of'games and institutions that oppress and dehumanize' such asnapalm, the Pentagon, Governor Reagan and the rat race, and tocreate communities where 'new values and new human relationscan grow.' ,,31The Berkeley Barb said about the Be-In, "The spiritual revolu-

tion will be manifest and proven. In unity we shall shower thecountry with waves of ecstasy and purification. Fear will be washedaway; ignorance will be exposed to sunlight; profits and empirewill lie drying on desert beaches; violence will be submerged andtransmuted to rhythm and dancing."s2On the morning of January 14, Snyder, Ginsberg, Watts, and

others performed pradakshina, a Hindu rite of circumambulation

ZEN EFFECTS180

It was not only the young who were affected. "One by one,"says Watts of his middle-aged friends, "I watched this changecoming over my friends as if they had been initiated into a mys-tery and were suddenly 'in the know' about something not expresslydefined.'?"A strongly pacifist mood was growing; horror as the details of

the Vietnam War became better known, resentment at the draft,and the newfound wonder at the natural world, all made war seemdeeply repulsive and produced the slogan "Make love not war.""Flower power" gradually hardened into a more overt kind. Theo-dore Roszak describes "the troubles" at Berkeley in 1966:

at the polo field. It was a fine day, and from early in the morningpeople began walking from all over the city toward the meadow.Tens of thousands were there, some with banners, some in robesand exotic clothing, others in denims. "The proper ecstatic notein dress was usually provided by a bright shirt or scarf, or a stringor two of beads or buttons with drug or peace messages. But manypeople brought fruit, flowers, incense, cymbals and tambourines,. . . bells, mirrors, feathers or bits of fur, the kind of thing peoplehad long carried on Haight Street to blow the mind of a passingtripper.'?"Speakers, rock bands, and Shunryu Suzuki-roshi of the San Fran-

cisco Zen Temple meditating on the platform and holding up aflower passed the afternoon. According to Charles Perry, somepeople hoped a flying saucer "with good news" might come down.In the event what came down was a parachutist said to be Owsley.At sunset Gary Snyder blew on a conch shell, Allen Ginsberg leda chant, and the crowd drifted away, some of them to build fires,chant, and pray on Ocean Beach. An unexpected spin-off from theBe-In was the comment of Police Chief Thomas Cahill."You're sort of the love generation, aren't you?" he asked a

delighted group from the Haight, a title which was instantlyclaimed.For all the love, ecstasy, religious devotion, and peaceful aims

of the love generation, there were signs that the wave had reachedits crest and was beginning to crash. One of the major problemswas in the Haight itself. So well publicized was it that it becamea mecca for teenagers from all over the country, some who camefor a weekend, some who had the idea of dropping out of schooland staying permanently. Along with this crusade of the innocentscame the drug pushers and a world of criminality.As early as 1967 Nicholas Von Hoffman noted in the Wash-

182 ZEN EFFECTS Counterculture

ington Post how the flower child world of Haight-Ashbury haddisintegrated into a nightmare of murderous criminality, as thedrug entrepreneurs, interested not in expanded consciousness butin money, fought for territory. Unintentionally, Von Hoffmansaid, the hippies had come to constitute "the biggest crime storysince prohibition."The money tray no longer waited in the cafe on Eighth Street.

Too many people had come to Haight-Ashbury looking for aneasy buck. A doctor who ran a "radical clinic" for hippies spokeabout the downfall of the neighborhood like this:

I think the mass media were primarily responsible for the destruc-tion of HA; they had for three, four years a quite interesting socialexperiment and with some health problems, but in general we wereall doing a good job and then all of a sudden hippies became pub-licity material, the word had spread throughout the United States,and every disturbed kid, runaway teenager, ambulatory schizo-phrenic, drug addict, knew about HA and they knew that if theycame to HA or at least they thought, there would be love and peaceand people sharing, which is exactlywhat happened about three orfour years ago, but you can't share items that are necessaryfor threehundred people with three hundred thousand, you know, and thecommunity just became destroyed as a result of this mass influx,also the media publicized the hippies so much that it aroused theanger of the dominant culture and it was declared a Communistconspiracyor un-American and it's amazing the hostility that mys-tical, non-violent, long-haired youth can evoke in the conservativeelement in the United Stares."

There was a growing anger against the "love generation."Clergy began to preach sermons against it, and police oppositionhardened. Leary was deported, first from Mexico because of pres-sure by the CIA, then from Dominica. Some of the hostility wasrichly deserved. There were groups like that around Andy Warhol

ZEN EFFECTS

in New York, indifferent to vision and spiritual experience, butunashamedly into "booze, speed, downers, ... drugs that provideescape, that turn off, toughen, and callous the nerve endings.":"Leary's original hope (never fully shared by Watts), that if

people could experience the sense of meaning, unity, and wondergiven by LSD, then social problems would be solved, began tolook very naive. Mental hospitals bore pathetic witness of practical"jokes" played on unsuspecting victims who had drunk a soft drinkor a cup of coffee containing the drug, and were full of people whocould not "come down" after one or more trips.The more idealistic among the young had begun to think in

terms of moving into the country, of growing their own food, ofstarting their own farms, and a number moved out into MarinCounty, California, and beyond.Others, influenced initially by Watts and Snyder, moved on from

drugs to Zen. Snyder quoted D. T. Suzuki as saying that peoplewho came to the zenda from LSD experiences showed an abilityto get into good zazen very rapidly. Snyder told the English Bene-dictine monk Dam Aelred Graham in 1967 that "LSD has beena real social catalyst and amounts to a genuine historical unpre-dictable. It's changing the lives of all sorts of people. It's remark-able and effective and it works in terms of forms, devotions,personal deities, appearances of bodhisattvas, Buddhas and godsto your eyes. It doesn't work in terms of non-forms, emptiness.("This isn't form is the same as emptiness," one Zen teacher whotried it reported, "this is emptiness is the same as form.")"In several American cities," Snyder also observed, "traditional

meditation halls of both Rinzai and Soto are flourishing. Many ofthe newcomers turned to traditional meditation after an initialacid experience. The two types of experience seem to inform eachother.":" (D. T. Suzuki later appeared to go back on the qualified

Counterculture

respect he had shown for the LSD experience and announced thatthe meditation experience was quite distinct from Zen.)Many who had used LSD as an opening to the inner world were

attracted to formal meditation. By the fall of 1966, according toRick Fields, "close to a hundred and fifty people were sitting zazenand attending lectures at the San Francisco Zen Center; fifty orsixty sat at least once a day, and eighty people, twice as many as theprevious year, had attended the seven day sesshin.... As ZenCenter itself grew, it naturally spawned a number of satellite cen-ters run by senior students ... in Berkeley, Mill Valley and LosAltos."s7San Francisco Zen Center raised a large sum of money to buy

land at Tassajara Hot Springs in the Los Padres National Forest,and the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center was founded. More than athousand people contributed money."It is for us in America," wrote Watts, "to realize that the goal

of action is contemplation. Otherwise we are caught up in mockprogress, which is just going on toward going on, what Buddhistscall samsara - the squirrel cage of birth and death. That peopleare getting together to acquire this property for meditation is oneof the most hopeful signs of our rimes.":"So the counterculture had moved by way of color, free sex, civil

rights, rock music, brotherly love, LSD and other psychedelics,and innovative lifestyles toward - at least for some people - aserious interest in meditation. A few years later Watts was to saythat people who had experimented with psychedelic chemicalsmight find that they had left them behind, "like the raft whichyou use to cross a river, and have found growing interest and evenpleasure in the simplest practice of zazen, which we perform likeidiots, without any special purpose."S9

Ten

The HomeBehindHome1969-1973

IN I969 WATTS AND JANO moved to Druid Heights. TheVallejo had become so well known from films and photographsthat Watts had begun to be pestered by disciples on the Sausalitowaterfront, and he badly needed a place where he could not easilybe found. He continued to use the boat for seminars and meetingsof the Society for Comparative Philosophy, the organization heand Jano had founded in I96I to promote ways of understandingdrawn from many religions and cultures. But henceforward homewas on Mount Tamalpais.Ever since his sequence of LSD experiences Watts had seen

Druid Heights as "home" and "the home behind home." Now heand Jana lived in their circular house, built by Roger Somers, highup over a valley with a view of great beauty. It was a kitchen,sitting room, and bedroom all in one. The bed disappeared out ofsight during the day, so that Watts did not have to retire to aseparate bedroom in the way that he hated, and there was a sundeck for outdoor living.The house "is hidden in a grove of high eucalyptus trees," wrote

Watts, "and overlooks a long valley whose far side is covered with

V.I

The Home Behind Home

a dense forest of bay, oak, and madrone so even in height thatfrom a distance it looks like brush. No human dwelling is in view,and the principal inhabitant of the forest is a wild she-goat whohas been there for at least nine years. Every now and then shecomes out and dances upon the crown of an immense rock whichrises far out of the forest."!In I968 Watts lost his earliest home: Rowan Cottage. In I96I

Emily died, and Watts, somewhat to the shock of his relatives,did not return to England for the funeral. Now Laurence hadgrown too frail to live on his own and had moved to an old peo-ple's home called Merevale. (It was pronounced Merryvale, butLaurence, with contempt, took pleasure in calling it Mere Vale.)Watts had gone to England to help him with the sad task of goingthrough his possessions and getting rid of them - the legacies ofmany years of happy marriage.Watts sadly put Rowan Cottage up for sale, having offered it

to Joy Buchan, who declined the offer. One day as he was clearingthe house he came upon "the Housetop," the enormous bureauthat in his childhood had seemed to contain an arcane secret; hefound himself going through its contents almost feverishly. "Therewere lots of interesting treasures and trinkets - but in all suchquests and searches, as also in my pull to the West, it keeps comingback to me that the secret is in the seeker.:" He was looking, hethought, for a jewel. Just as he had often searched Persian minia-tures with a magnifying glass, losing himself in their tiny mysticalworlds, he thought that the concentration on a tiny perfect whole- a dewdrop, a jewel, a snowflake, a flower - was an image ofthe universal of which we ourselves are a parr. Looking for thejewel in the Housetop was his search for the universal and eternal,for the energy that had formed him, but from which he had sooften felt cut off.His years of fame had not in a sense helped him to find the

Roger Somers believed that the "tragic flaw" in Watts was thathe suffered a deep neurotic shyness when it came to small groups,as for example at the sort of cocktail party that was usually givenbefore or after one of his lectures:

jewel. Film taken of Watts in 1969 shows him looking seedy, ill,and older than his fifty-four years; friends were concerned abouthis obvious fatigue and about his heavy drinking.Gary Snyder, who had just returned to California from one of

his periods of study in Japan, this time with his wife Masa andhis son, Kai, began to notice that drinking had become a seriousproblem for Watts. Watts had arranged to rent Gary and Masa ahouse at Druid Heights, so the two men saw a good deal of oneanother. In Kyoto, Snyder had noticed that Watts drank morethan was necessary, but now he had moved into a phase of heavierdrinking.

I told him as best as I could to get off it, but by this time he wasstuck with an enormous alimony payment, and he was having totake far more gigs than anybody in their right mind would want todo just earning money, and he was also spending more money thanhe had to. He lived very well, and he was also supporting lots ofpeople, including a full-time secretary.So he had to keep working,and as you keep working, you know, you got to play these roles, andyou also keep drinking 'cause there's always these parties and soforth, so that doesn't help you slow it down. So he just wore him-self out. It was out of his control, that was my feeling. The dynamicsof his life had gotten beyond his control, and he didn't know whatto do about it.The amazing thing was that he kept such expansiveness, such

good humor, you know, with that great big laugh.... He nevershowed a waver or a wobble in his self-esteem, in his confidence.He never let a little crack open that ''I'm having trouble." But hewas putting away a bottle of vodka a day - I saw those bottlesunder the sink.

He would sweat blood before these events and was quite uncom-fortable in them. Then one day he discovered that if he had two,maybe three martinis, he was not only comfortable, but the life ofthe party. He could not have gone on with his lecture tours andthe cocktail parties that went with them with any ease at all with-out that lubrication.... He could talk to people one to one, or ahundred to one, but cocktail party banter had him trembling andperspiring.

Paula McGuire, his editor at Pantheon Books, remembers Watts'stelling her in 1968 that he was suffering from an enlarged liver,and that his doctor had warned him that he must give up drinking.For some months he did so, to the relief of his family and friends.Elsa Gidlow remembers the disappointment of sitting beside himat a Druid Heights lunch party and noticing that he was drinkingagain."Oh Alan!" she said, as he reached for the brandy."If I don't drink, I don't feel sexy," he growled in reply.Perhaps the drinking came from a deep sense of loneliness that

he had so often written about, a loneliness that increased with thecocktail parties and the fame. Considering Watts's lifelong interestin psychotherapy it seems odd that some wise and clever therapistcould not help him; the trouble was that though Watts seemed tothink psychoanalysis a good idea for other people, he could nomore undertake and sustain it himself than he had been able tosustain sanzen with Sokei-an. He recounted how, at his one at-tempt, he felt that the analyst had turned the tables and was askinghim for help. Jano, he claimed, had had the same experience, andshe had cheekily suggested that she and her analyst adjourn to thenearest bar where he could buy her a drink and talk about hisproblems. The comment is scathing, superior, and is meant to sug-gest that Watts and Jano knew so much about themselves that noanalyst could help them - a somewhat unlikely state of affairs. It

The Home Behind HomeZEN EFFECTS188

ZEN EFFECTS

also might be a defense against painful revelations. If there wasa choice between maintaining the precarious self-control of the"know-it-all" adult and the humble discipline of trying to redis-cover the lost child in himself, Watts was not prepared to make it.Another kind of therapy comes to many people through love

affairs or marriage. Perhaps Watts never quite despaired of thissort of healing, although his attempts at loving had often broughtdown storms of accusation on his head. By the time he marriedJano he knew that he was incapable of monogamy. What heoffered her instead was public loyalty and private devotion thatwas unswerving.Life with Watts was hard for J ana, though. An intelligent

woman, well-fitted to be his intellectual companion, she soonfound when she traveled with him or sat in on his seminars thatpeople sat spellbound at the feet of her guru-husband and hadlittle interest in her ideas, even when they were just as good as his.She was too blunt, too honest, too little in awe of Watts, toohuman, not to be exasperated by this. As time went on she got intothe habit of arguing with him or contradicting him in public.Sandy Jacobs, who first recorded Watts on tape, remembered howoften on recordings you could hear the guru laying down the lawas the awestruck pupils lapped up his pronouncements. Thenjano's voice chipped in with "No, Alan, you've got it wrong ... ."Watts seemed to accept this correction meekly, as if he felt heneeded it.If she undermined him at his seminars, he had subtle ways of

undermining her elsewhere. Joan and Ann, who were fond of her,noticed how when Jano started to cook a meal, Watts would grad-ually take over from her, leaving her with nothing to do. Even insmall areas of life, he "knew better," needed to be in control.Early in the marriage he was already having affairs, usually

with very bright, attractive, younger women he met on his travels.

The Home Behind Home

He used to say to friends, though not to jano, that he "could notbear to sleep alone." So he would pick up a pretty girl on a univer-sity campus and take her to bed with him. There were manywomen who were happy to accommodate him; he was reputed tobe an accomplished lover, and fame was a predictable aphrodisiac.He was a fine lover so long as he did not feel there was any attemptto hold him or trap him into marriage, and there were deeper,more lasting relationships with women friends with whom hecould relax. He made it clear that there was no question of hisever leaving Jano.Roger Somers thought that Watts might have made a better job

of marriage if he had married women with whom he did not feelthe need to play the Pygmalion role.

He would have felt insecure if he'd been with some really heavy,finger-popping, laughing, gay woman, yet that was the kind ofwoman he sought in extracurricular ways.He saw them freely, wasquite effectivewith them, and loved them, but to live with one ofthose- here was the crack in the vase: his unwillingness to acceptjoy. Instead his self-importancewas demonstrated by their inabilityto cope- he would take over from them - and of course, theywould end up morbidly dependent upon him. This was not like theman who was talking to us about Zen. That's not Zen - that'sZen backwards.

Watts refused to acknowledge any of this when Roger broughtit up in conversation. "He would be a little awkward about it, andit was not easy as a rule for me to make him feel awkward."J ana, as well as Watts, was drinking a good deal - the strains

of their life together, as well as the mutual example of heavydrinking, exacerbated the problem for both of them.Paula McGuire remembers an evening when she and the writer

Joseph Campbell were to dine out with the Wattses in New York.Instead of accompanying them Jano was sent home in a taxi,

Snyder observed that Watts moved from Zen to social and psycho-logical concerns, then to visionary concerns, and finally, late in thesixties, to an interest in Taoism. Snyder saw Watts as part of a

advice was good, and many people were probably the better forfollowing it.Watts did try to insist that he was a fake, a rascal, and, primarily,

an entertainer, but that only added to his fame and his following.The tragic underside of this fame could be seen in the furious andbitter letters from Dorothy complaining that he did not sendenough money (though he was faithful in keeping up his commit-ment), in an unhappy Jano who only stopped drinking when hewent away on his travels, and in his own desperate dependence onvodka.Fame did at least put Watts in touch with a kind of international

brotherhood of people interested in the same sets of ideas. Heknew scientists and priests, Buddhist monks and artists, psycho-therapists and craftsmen, academics and doctors. It seemed to himthat the ideas of people from disparate disciplines were converg-ing in important areas. By listening to theologians, religiousthinkers from East and West, anthropologists, psychiatrists, psy-chotherapists of many schools, and neurologists, Watts mightbegin to try to join together ideas derived from different experi-ences of the human body, mind, and spirit. He knew, or corre-sponded with, Thomas Merton; Dam Aelred Graham; ShunryuSuzuki and his successor at San Francisco Zen Center, RichardBaker-roshi; Lama Govinda; Lama Chogyam Trungpa; anthro-pologist Gregory Bateson; scientist John Lilly, the Zurich Jung-ians; a group of Stanford neurologists working on the humanbrain; R. D. Laing, Fritz Peds, and Abraham Maslow; and theEsalen people.

193The Home Behind Home

II,Ii

suffering, according to Watts, from hypoglycemia. "We jusrthought she was drunk," says McGuire. Whether or not she wasdrunk on that occasion, Jano did suffer from a blood sugar prob-lem that affected her health and was not helped by her heavydrinking.Quite apart from his marriage, Watts was living under consider-

able tension. There was Dorothy's alimony and the cost of main-taining her five children and paying their medical expenses, inaddition to the living expenses of Jano and himself (and Jano, onoccasion, was given to wild bursts of spending). The life of a free-lance writer is a notoriously anxious one, even for those with amodest number of dependents; for Watts to meet his financialcommitments meant a life of almost unceasing industry: writing,lecturing, broadcasting, appearing on television, traveling to speakon university campuses, or going abroad to take part in other talksand television appearances. The periods of idleness, which forWatts permitted inner development and change, became fewerand fewer. Though his writing was always professional, competent,and often brilliant in its perception and exposition, Watts beganto repeat himself and covered his lack of energy with a self-assurance that some found very irritating. From clothes, to food,to lifestyle, to sex - Watts knew best how it should be managed.Many people, however, were fascinated by the "know-it-all"

touch, perhaps interpreting it as an authentic bit of British arro-gance, perhaps merely liking to be told what to do by someonewho had interesting and original ideas. They allowed Watts to

tell them to sleep on mattresses on the floor of the living room, towear loose Oriental clothes, to cook with fresh, natural ingredients,to dance, to chant, to make love freely and joyfully, and to despisechairs and plastics, both of which he disliked. What he wanted, hetold his readers, was that they should "come to their senses." The

ZEN EFFECTS

Watts had given Dom Aelred two fans, on one of which he haddrawn the calligraphic characters for "Form is emptiness" and on

M.A.: I think he's a very clever man, clever interpreter of Zen, butI don't know how much he has practised Zen meditation.Graham: Not much, I don't think; but one can't be sure.M.A.: Maybe nor,"

I was beginning to question what seemed to me the easiness of hisbooks- but his argument was that these ideas needed a skillfuland popular exponent. As I got a chance to browse in his library,I was very impressed and convinced that perhaps he knew what hewas doing; obviously this was no lightweight thinker.... He hadreally done his homework, and that deepened my respect for thekind of work he was trying to do.

195

Dom Aelred also interviewed Gary Snyder about his beat back-ground, and about how Snyder would compare the insight givenby LSD and similar drugs to the insight acquired through sittingin zazen. Snyder saw the grave dangers of such drugs, but alsobelieved that the insights they gave were real. Watts came intothis conversation too, in a joking way.

Graham: Alan's going to found a new religion in San Francisco, Iunderstand.G.S.: Which Alan?Graham: Alan Watts.G.S.: Is he going to start a new religion?Graham: Called Hum. On September fifteenth in San Francisco.H.Y. [Harold Talbot}: He's not founding it; he's drawing attentionto it.G.S.: That's nice."

Dom Aelred was, in fact, having a wonderful time in Watts'scompany, accompanying him to parties of hippies and on all sortsof interesting trips in Japan. On one occasion they took LSD to-gether. "I think there was a touch of genius about him," Dom

the other the circle representing sunyata, ku, roughly translatedas "emptiness." They became a focal point in several of the inter-views. The Rev. Kobori Sohaku at his subternple at Daitoku-jiMonastery was scarcely more enthusiastic than Professor Abe, oncethe Japanese interpreter had explained the origin of the fans. Hedealt with the situation by using the Zen trick of disclaiming allunderstanding.

K.S.: I hope you will explain the meaning. I don't know!Graham: I have come all the way to Japan to find out.K.s.: I don't know the meaning. It is taken from scripture, a veryfamous saying. He is quite good at calligraphy, Mr. Watts. The fanis too little for you - you need a much bigger one."

The Home Behind HomeZEN EFFECTS194

group of visionaries helping ro give birth to a new consciousness.Much of the time, Snyder felt, Watts was right on top of what wasgoing on, understanding it, and helping it on its way. And byabout 1967 Watts had turned into a full-scale flower child.Once or twice Snyder challenged Watts about the sort of pop-

ular books he was writing, wondering if they were worthy of theideas he was trying to expound.

Christians and Christianity still interested Watts a good deal.When Dom Aelred Graham, the author of Zen Catholicism anda Benedictine monk from Ampleforth Abbey in England, wantedto visit Kyoto to hold lengthy conversations with the rosbis andmonks at the Zen temples there, Watts seemed a natural adviserand guide. The conversations were later published in book form.Considering that Watts was not an official participant in the

conversations, he recurs surprisingly often in the text. One of theZen exponents, Prof. Maseo Abe, commented a little severely onWatts:

one would settle on him. He remembered Watts's taste for shoot-ing arrows straight up into the air above his own head. (Janoonce saw one of the arrows come down to land, quivering, be-tween his feet.) He remembered Watts's awkwardness in handy-man tasks around Druid Heights; the Brahmin education hadspoiled him for those sorts of skills.jane's niece, Kathleen, herself now part of the boat community

of Sausalito and an artist and craftswoman, remembers the extraor-dinary way Watts played with her and her brother when she wasstill a child. Once in New York he took them to the zoo andbought helium balloons for all three of them. While the childrenhappily clutched theirs, Watts deliberately released the string ofhis and watched it float up into the sky - an act that made a deepimpression on the children.In 1964 Watts met the Jungian analyst June Singer at a cock-

tail party. June Singer had recently become a widow after a longmarriage and was suffering from depression. At the party, given inWatts's honor, a sense of sympathy and recognition passed be-tween them. She had just moved into a new apartment, and thenext morning, a beautiful sunny day, she was sitting staring at arow of paint pots and thinking that she should begin work onrepainting when she decided on an impulse to call Watts at hishotel and find out how he was getting along. He was delighted tohear her voice and suggested that they spend the afternoon on thebeach, a meeting that was the beginning of a long and happy,though intermittent, love affair.Watts would stay with her whenever he found himself in Chi-

cago, and little by little she came out of her depression. Shaped byan "uptight" Jewish background and a rather correct Jewish mar-riage, she was surprised and delighted by Watts's attitude to lifeand to sex. His extraordinary energy, his readiness to dance or to

ZEN EFFECTS

Aelred says, "and that he did much good for lots of people, espe-cially perhaps in California. Like the rest of us, of course, he hadhis weaknesses. He could lift the elbow regularly and frequently,but he was generous and kind, and I never heard him speakharshly of anyone."

Watts's private expeditions in Kyoto were a source of great pleas-ure. His favorite haunt was Tera-machi Street where, in the tinyshops, he could buy implements for the tea ceremony, wonderfultea, ancient pottery, rosaries, books, incense that smelled of aloes-wood (the essential smell of Buddhism, according to Dr. Suzuki),writing brushes, paper, and fine ink. One of his finds was a smallstick of vermilion ink covered with gold leaf. He said that to useit he rubbed it on a windowsill, early in the morning, using a dropof dew for water."On that same trip Gary Snyder remembers Watts's pleasure in

a big party at Kyoto, which was full of congenial guests: Japanesepoets and artists, priests from the Jodo Shin sect in California whowere particularly fond of jazz, and Hindu visitors. The partyseemed to catch the worldwide, cosmopolitan nature of thecounterculture.Then, as so often, Watts's extraordinary capacity to enjoy him-

self came to the fore. It was his gift for play that his friends en-joyed most.Roger Somers, who had noticed a similar quality in some of the

great black jazz musicians he had met, felt that Watts had thegreatest quality of play of anyone he had ever known. Living closeto Watts allowed him to know and appreciate the small details ofWatts's life and habits that most people did not know about. Heremembered how, when the two of them sat together out-of-doors,butterflies would come and settle all over Watts, while scarcely

The Home Behind Home 197

where he was suffering from delirium tremens, and she realizedthat he knew how destructive the habit had become."That's how I am," he said to her sadly. "I can't change."

By 1970 his other friends were growing more concerned about hisobvious fatigue and the effects of his drinking. Robert Shapiro,who thought he was being "eaten alive" by his many dependents,discussed the problem with him. The strain of making enoughmoney to keep everybody and of living out his extraordinary rolein the counterculture was slowly killing him. The solution, Sha-piro said, was for him to get out of it all for a bit. It was absurdthat a man of his interests had never been to China. What heshould do was to go away to China for a year, giving no address,and leaving Robert to handle the claims and complaints of hisrelatives. It was a gesture of friendship and seemed to offer realhope for Watts to get his health and his energy back. He set offon the first leg of his journey, but then Robert received a telephonecall. The guilt was too great; he could not abandon Jano, eventemporarily.Despite failing health Watts continued to lead the bohemian

life, going to parties, staying up late, drinking and smoking heavily.Yet even for a bohemian and a drinker, he was very disciplined,rising early to write, coping well with business and with his vastcorrespondence, never missing an airplane or a deadline. His pub-lishers always received meticulously typed manuscripts on time.He never admitted in public to making very serious attempts at

meditation, implying that the closest he came to zazen was goingfor a walk. Gary Snyder, however, believed that he sat in zazenmore and more often in the last years of his life - they talked alot about zazen together and Gary noticed the well-worn medita-tion cushion in front of the altar in Watts's house.

ZEN EFFECTS

sing or to make love, his pleasure in all the sensual joys of lifedeepened her own capacity for happiness. She was amazed atWatts's ability to unwind; after a grueling evening as a speakerin which he had been giving out for hours, he would curl up likea cat, utterly relaxed.She knew also that Watts's pleasure in the relationship came

partly from the absence of demands, and she did not make themupon him. From the beginning she was aware of his intense devo-tion to Jano. He seemed to her responsible but not guilty in hisattitude to his marriage.She found the public aspect of Watts difficult, the act of what

she called "I am Alan Watts" when they went to a restaurant to-gether. After a year or two their friendship temporarily foundered.She was working hard at her doctoral dissertation and told Wattsto keep away since she did not want to be distracted. Hurt by whathe felt as rejection Watts did not come back, and it was only afterthey met by chance on an airplane runway that their relationshipcontinued.Watts helped her with her writing and suggested the title for

her book Boundaries of the Soul. Throughout much of their timetogether Dr. Singer was working on an idea that she later expressedin her book Androgyny; her theory was that human beings weredeveloping in the direction of psychological androgyny, and thatthe more advanced people among us, in evolutionary terms, alreadyshowed marked characteristics of both masculine and feminine intheir make-up. Watts seemed to her the perfect androgyne, activein his masculine aspect, receptive in his feminine. Besides this, shefelt he had a gift of seeing the spark in people, in knowing wherelife and growth lay.But like many of his friends she was saddened to see how heavily

he was drinking. On one occasion she visited him in the hospital,

The Home Behind Home 199

In a growing number of incidents the public facade almostcracked. Joan and her husband Tim remember going to collectWatts when he was due to give a public lecture - as his drinkinghad grown worse he had given up driving - and finding himheavily drunk. They drove a few blocks, and Watts insisted thatthey stop at a liquor store, where he bought a bottle of vodka. Heput it on the back seat, and they drove off with Watts sitting be-tween them in the front, but soon he had to turn round and takea swig out of the bottle. Joan was amused at the sight of thefamous Alan Watts with his bottom in the air drinking neat vodka;she was also fully aware of the tragic implications. When theyarrived at the lecture hall Watts walked onto the podium and gavehis usual admirable lecture. (This was a miracle frequently re-peated.) Only those who knew him very well could have guessedthat he was very drunk indeed. Questions from the floor weremore difficult. Watts seemed not to be able to make sense of whathe was being asked, or to be answering some other question alto-gether. Occasionally he appeared to have gone to sleep between theasking of the question and his answering of it. Such was the awein which he was held in the Bay Area, or such was people's readi-ness to attribute any eccentricity to some rare piece of Zen insight,that groups continued to ask him to speak; he gave good value.He no longer thought in terms of giving up drinking. He knewnow that he was riding a tiger and that it was too late to get down.It was ironic that his reputation, which had declined slightly at

one point in the sixties when he did not involve himself with civilrights or with the peace movement, seemed to be rising again ashis own grasp on life was failing. Apocryphal legends about himabounded, many of them absurd, though he did seem to haveunusual perceptions and intuitions. For instance, Joan rememberstalking to a woman who had gone to Watts for counseling. He

interrupted her in midsentence and told her to stand up. He placeda steadying hand on her shoulder and at that moment there wasquite a severe earthquake shock. Watts had been aware of thecoming shock waves several minutes before she was.

Watts's relations with his older children were good. Joan and Annand eventually Mark and Ricky, his two sons by Dorothy, were allfond of him and saw a good deal of him; the daughters of hismarriage to Dorothy, on the other hand, never overcame the dis-tance set up by his desertion in 1960 and were perhaps stronglyinfluenced by Dorothy's bitterness toward him. On occasions whenhe tried to visit the family there were verbal attacks on him, andhe used to take Joan or Ann with him to try to forestall theseoutbursts.He gave each of his children a particular legacy. At the age of

eighteen or so he would offer them LSD and care for them mostlovingly through the trip, a remarkable memory for each of them.(Others, such as the friend Ruth Costello, who first took acid withWatts also remember how careful and helpful he was.)Mark, who was parted from his father at the age of thirteen

when Watts left Mill Valley, got to know him again in New Yorkjust before his eighteenth birthday. It was a happy reunion; theyhad a great time together. Watts arranged for him to take a pho-tography course in the East Village, and Mark remembers withpleasure a visit by Watts to New York when Watts took him tovisit friends at the Chelsea Hotel. Up in the penthouse suite ofthe hotel they played a wicked game on the passersby with a tinylaser beam device that they shone down upon the baffled peoplebelow."There was this wino," Mark remembers, "who was convinced

he had seen Jesus."

201The Home Behind HomeZEN EFFECTS200

Later on, at Druid Heights, Watts would take his vodka andMark would take a joint, and they would go and sit up on the hillstogether and talk about things. Mark, like the others, was troubledby his drinking: "I'd say to him, 'Dad, don't you want to live?'and he would say, 'Yes, but it's not worth holding onto.'''

In 1971 was Laurence Watts's ninetieth birthday, and Watts andJano returned to Chislehurst to hold a celebration for the old man.They gave a big family party at the pub by Saint Nicholas'sChurch, the Tiger's Head, and after dinner Watts sang the PeteSeeger song "Little Boxes" as part of the entertainment. Hiscousins formed the impression that both Alan and Jano were alittle strange, that they were "on" something. Believing the wildrumors of life in California the cousins assumed it must be drugsrather than alcohol.Watts also made such a long after-dinner speech to wind up the

evening that the waiters, wanting to clear up and go off duty, werevisibly impatient. Visible, that is, to everyone except Watts whowent on talking."If Confucius here would just stop talking we could go home,"

one of the waiters was heard to remark. When Watts eventuallyrealized their irritation he was surprised and concerned. He hadnot meant to be arrogant; he was just absorbed in the pleasure oftalking to his friends and relatives.On that same trip Watts and Laurence motored up to Cam-

bridge, at the invitation of Bishop John Robinson, to conduct a"liturgy of contemplation" at Trinity. The chapel was packed withundergraduates. Watts had sent his usual meticulous instructionsto Bishop Robinson before the service, and the occasion had a mov-ing and simple drama about it. A chair had been set in the middleof the altar steps with a candle alight on a chair beside it. Many

who came to the service sat on cushions on the floor in front ofthe speaker with a half circle of chairs behind them. Watts camein wearing a cassock, sat down, and talked about contemplation:"Man discovers himself as inseparable from the cosmos in bothits positive and negative aspects, its appearances and disappear-ances.?" Then he intoned the first line of "Veni Creator," the an-cient hymn that invokes the action of the Holy Spirit, while thelights dimmed overhead. He conducted a meditation, with longperiods of silence. Then they sang the Nunc Dimittis and a litany,after which Watts gave a benediction and the choir sang a longGregorian amen. Watts could still orchestrate a moving and beau-tiful service.This liturgical experiment was not an isolated occasion. Licensed

by Bishop James Pike in San Francisco, Watts had held similarservices in Grace Cathedral, which were enthusiastically attended.News of his involvement with the church caused rumors that hewas thinking of asking to have Anglican orders restored to him,but rumors were all they were. Far from returning to the church,he still managed to offend Episcopal high-church sensibilities onoccasion.On one such occasion, entertained by senior clergy in New York,

he had been drawn into discussion of the Anglican Holy Com-munion service as compared with the Catholic Mass. The compla-cency of his companions over the rather sober rite used at the timepushed him into his now famous outrageousness."Holy Communion?" he was heard to remark. "Why, it's like

fucking a plastic woman!" In the silence that followed the onlysound to be heard was the bishop's wife biting nervously andnoisily into an apple.More seriously, he had written about "the problem" of the

churches. "What are we going to do with an enormous amount

2°3The Home Behind HomeZEN EFFECTS202

of valuable real estate known, not quite correctly, as the Church-whether it be Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran,Methodist, Congregational, or Unitarianj '" Strip them of pews,was his suggestion, leaving only a few chairs for the sick andelderly, and putting carpets and cushions down for the rest. Aban-don the "interminable chatter" of sermons and petitions, and sub-stitute instead a liturgy that helped the worshippers into mysticalcontemplation and silence - by way of chanting, singing, dancing,meditative rituals, and dramatic enactments of the Mass.

For Christmas 1971 Laurence made a tape wishing Alan and hisgrandchildren well and reciting the Kipling poems that he loved.Watts played it during Christmas dinner at Joan's house in Bolinas,and then one by one Watts's grandchildren, Joan's husband,Tim, Elsa Gidlow, Jano, and finally Watts himself, sent theirgood wishes to "Granddaddy." On the tape Watts described theturkey lunch, complete with pateen croiae made by him, andJoan's daughter Elizabeth described how Joan had just given hera doll that had once belonged to her, together with a four-posterbed and a doll's wardrobe made by Laurence and a quilt and anembroidered stool made by Emily. Jano described how, as soon asChristmas was over, she and Alan were to go off on vacation toMexico "away from mails, the telephone, and family." In fact,they went on this rare vacation before Watts finished the tape.Completing the recording in May Watts described how, in thefirst few months of 1972, he had given lectures all over NewMexico and in Boulder, Colorado, and how he had spoken inVancouver and on Cortes Island and then in Chicago. He had, headded laughingly, been obliged to pay a tax bill of ten thousanddollars in April, so he had had no choice but to work hard.And work hard he did, for despite the alcoholism, his energy

for his projects had not diminished. He had gone to Esalen to

work with Army officers on the drug problem in the U.S. Army.The formal meetings had not yielded much, since the officerswouldtalk in "rnemorandese," but the informal conversations had madehim feel more hopeful and had given him insight about officialattitudes. In addition, he, Mark, and Sandy Jacobs were making aseries of half-hour video cassettes in preparation for the growingvideo market. Up at Druid Heights Elsa Gidlow and RogerSomers were considering selling land to the government on a one-hundred-year lease and building a Japanese-style library for Watts'sbooks.Another significant publication was in the works, Watts's auto-

biography. In 1970 Paula McGuire had suggested to Alan that hemight like to write an autobiography, which he did, and in 1972Pantheon published In My Own Way. Mrs. McGuire remembersher disappointment when the manuscript came in. Though an in-teresting book in many ways and one that was bound to sell, therewas something too coy, too knowing about it, an infuriating air ofeffortless ease. It was honest as far as it went, but it hardly wentfar enough, in her opinion. "I sensed he had not really writtenabout his mother at all," she says. There was something thin andunsatisfying about it, a lot of name dropping, perhaps to make upfor the other omissions of the book, and it had the air of havingbeen dictated rather carelessly. The material was haphazard in itsorder; Watts repeatedly returned to discussing his childhood andhis schooldays long after he had passed on to later stages of his life.It is easy to guess at some of the difficulties that Watts had as

he approached this task. The book was a guaranteed seller in ad-vance, and he needed the money, but a truthful autobiographywould have imposed impossible conditions upon him.He could not write easily of his feelings about his mother with-

out causing great distress to his father (though within strict limitshe made a brave attempt). In fact, other interesting omissions may

2°5The Home Behind HomeZEN EFFECTS2°4

In the early seventies Watts paid a couple of visits to the SierraNevada, where Gary and Masa Snyder had built Kitkitdizze, aJapanese-style house and a zendo deep in the woods. Watts ad-mired the house; lying on his back on the floor and looking upinto the pitched ceiling he said that it was "a very noble view."Gary remembers their shooting arrows together and sitting out-side peeling apples, preparing to dry them. They had "lots of sakeand gossip" and talked, among other things, about whether LSDwas a good idea or not.Their feeling by this time was that "letting it loose in the

society" had done harm. The first people to experiment withpeyote, LSD, and similar drugs had been artists, poets, psycholo-gists, and students of religion, and most of them had handled itwell, finding it an interesting and creative experience. Conse-

have occurred, in part, from Watts's attempt to spare his father'sfeelings. There is no account of his parents' removal from RowanCottage when economic hardship overwhelmed them, nor does hemention the pain of Laurence's unemployment. Not only did Lau-rence write the foreword, but he also read the book in draft,suggesting many omissions.Watts also could not write truthfully of the sexual difficulties

that had gradually destroyed his marriage to Eleanor and had losthim his job in the Episcopal priesthood wirhout alienating mostof his admirers. He could not write of his present marital difficul-ties; in fact, he gives Jano a slightly patronizing pat on the headwhenever he mentions her, as if, like a sulky child, she will becomedifficult if not publicly noticed. He is, however, generous to bothhis other wives in the book, probably because it was not in hisnature to be bitter. Eleanor was deeply touched by the book whenshe read it and felt largely reconciled to Watts because of the wayhe described their marriage.

quently, no one was prepared to see that when LSD became morewidely used in society the results would be bizarre indeed, withpeople who were not in any way ready for the experience becomingmonomaniacs and self-appointed messiahs. It was just too potentfor those who were psychologically, aesthetically, or spirituallyunprepared for it.

2°7The Home Behind Home

Watts's own religious interest was now centered on Taoism. In ajournal he wrote during 1971-72, Cloud-hidden, WhereaboutsUnknown, he describes his feelings on watching the mountainstream after the rains on Mount Tamalpais:

When I stand by the stream and watch it, I am relatively still, andthe flowingwater makes a path acrossmy memory so that I realizeits transience in comparison with my stability. This is, of course, anillusion in the sense that I, too, am in flow and likewise have nofinal destination- for can anyone imagine finality as a form oflife? My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern inthe water."

The human problem, as Watts sees it, is the attempt to gaincontrol of the "streaming," a habitual tension that sets up a chronicfrustration, the belief that force or effort or will can solve ourdifficulties.In contrast to this Western approach to "how things are" is the

Chinese concept of the Tao, the course of nature, that which flowsof its own accord, says Watts: "You can get the feel of it bybreathing without doing anything to help your breath along. Letthe breath out, and then let it come back by itself, when it feelslike it." Once the breather has "let go" of the breath and allowedit to go its own way, it becomes slower and stronger. "This hap-pens because you are now 'with' the breath and no longer 'outsideit' as controller." In the same way, thoughts, feelings, and all ex-periences may be allowed to follow their own course, watched

ZEN EFFECTS206

detachedly by the one who has them. "If you find yourself askingwho is watching and why, take it as simply another wiggle of thestream.":"Our fear, says Watts, is that if we don't control everything,

events will run wild - our suspicion of what is natural and spon-taneous is deep. Letting go is an experiment few are prepared tomake. Letting go works in the paradoxical sense that creative andconstructive action comes from a knowledge that

every willful effort to improve the world or oneself is futile, andso long as one can be beguiled by any political or spiritual schemefor molding things nearer to the heart's desire one will be frus-trated, angry or depressed- that is, unless the first step in anysuch scheme is to see rhat nothing can be done. This is not becauseyou are a victim of fate, but becaue there is no "you" to be fated,no observing self apart from the stream.11

Once the illusion of the separate self is dissipated, then, he says,it is like restoring balance in dancing or in judo; once the "you"knows itself as part of the stream, then the true energy or powerworks through it.Watts began a book developing these ideas: Tao: The Water-

courseWay, continuing with his image of the stream. He had beenteaching, both at Esalen and at Sausalito, with the tai chi masterAl Chung-liang Huang. A friendship quickly grew between themas they worked over Chinese texts together, trying out varioustranslations, trying to decipher all the possible meanings.In their last teaching session together at Esalen Al Chung-liang

Huang remembered a joyful afternoon session in which theirpupils ended up dancing and rolling down the grassy slopes:

Alan and I started to walk back to the lodge, feeling exuberant,arms around each other, hands sliding along one another's spine.Alan turned to me and started to speak, ready to impress me with

his usual eloquence about our successfulweek together. I noticeda sudden breakthrough in his expression; a look of lightness andglow appeared all around him. Alan had discovereda differentwayto tell me of his feelings: "Yah Ha Ho Ha! Ho "We gibbered and danced all the way up the hill.' 2

2°9The Home Behind Home

Warts finished five chapters of the new book, one on the Chineseuse of ideograms and the difference such a language makes to theunderstanding of those who use it. By contrast the linear languageof the West has resulted in an emphasis on progress and thus oncontrol, as opposed to the cyclic Chinese view of time and history.The next chapter described the two poles of cosmic energy, the

yang and the yin, otherwise thought of as the light and the dark,the firm and the yielding, the strong and the weak, the rising andthe falling, the masculine and the feminine - the complemen-tarity that is the key to harmonious existence.In the third chapter he repeats the image of the stream, the

watercourse way from which you cannot really deviate even if youwish; you can only fight against it like a swimmer exhaustinghimself by trying to swim against the tide. Next, Watts discusseswu-wei, the famous principle of nonaction, the refusal of counter-feit action, meddling, forcing, working against the grain of things.Finally, he writes about Te - virtue - a way of contemplation,

of "being aware of life without thinking about it," the expressionof the Tao in actual living.When these five chapters were completed Watts told Al Chung-

liang Huang with glee, "I have now satisfiedmyself and my readersin scholarship and intellect. The rest of this book will be all funand surprises! "'3Before he could get on with the fun and surprises, however, he

had another exhausting lecture tour to Europe planned. He wroteto Laurence on September 5, 1973:

ZEN EFFECTS208

The eve of the trip, however, found both Watts and Jano inpoor shape for such a demanding undertaking. Early in Septemberjano's rwenty-one-year-old niece Kathleen came over from Europefor a holiday at Druid Heights. The plan was for her to spend afew weeks with Watts and Jano and then accompany them backto Europe when they went on the trip. When she arrived, full ofexcitement and enthusiasm, she found Jano far too ill as a resultof drinking to go anywhere at all, and Watts in only marginallybetter shape. Having admired this unusual couple from afar formost of her youth she felt very shocked and let down."Uncle Alan, why?" she asked him, as his children had so often

done.

Dear Daddy,I have made arrangements for Jano and I ro arrive in London onthe morning of September zyth and ro stay at the Charing CrossHotel until about October 4th, when we have ro go to the Con-tinent - Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Amsterdam and Geneva.In the meantime, I have opened a London bank account. This is

at Barclays, 27 Regent Street, SW1 and the number is 20-71-6420048305. I can't imagine that they have more than 20 millionclients, but that is it!During the visit to England I shall need to take two days out to

go to Cambridge and York - ro see Joseph Needham and JohnRobinson, and to confer with the Benedictine fathers at Ample-forth. I have a date with Toby [Christmas Humphreys] on the zorh.Otherwise, take it that we shall come down to Chislehurst on the

afternoon of the 25th and have dinner together at the Tiger, andmake up our plans from there on. Will you let Joy know that weare coming. We would also very much like ro see Leslie and Peggy.I am more than halfway through my next book - a rather

scholarly though simply wrirten study of Taoism.Much love from us both,As ever, Alan.

The visit to England included taking part in a television pro-gram about drugs called "The Timeless Moment." Other partici-pants ranged from a simple-minded acidhead at one end of thescale to a disapproving clergyman at the other. Watts took amoderate line on taking drugs: "I don't exactly advocate it. I sayit's a very useful adjunct to human knowledge to have these drugs,just as microscopes and telescopes are, but they have to be usedwith greatest care because all investigation into these realms isdangerous." But he thought the changed perception that found

211

to which the good fathers invited a whole gaggle of gurus for afive-day contemplative retreat. It was a marvellous and most en-couraging experience. For ... we found that any real oppositionbetween the I-Thou [devotional or bhakti] attitude and the All-is-One attitude could be transcended in a silence of the mind in whichwe all stopped verbalizing. It was fascinating ro take part withHindu swamis and Trappist monks in 4: 30 A.M. sessions for Zenmeditation where we all seemed ro get into a state of consciousnessin which there was nothing left to argue about - as well as roattend sessions for the Hesychast Jesus prayer conducted by anArchimandrite whose theological views were extremely conserva-tive. It all ended up with everyone dancing on the green to theguitar music of a Hassidic rabbi! Lex orandi lex credendi."

The Home Behind Home

"When I drink I don't feel so alone," he told her.Kathleen offered to stay behind and look after Jano while

Watts was away in Europe; in his absence, as on other occasions,Jano stopped drinking.Watts's trip to Europe included a trip to the Benedictine Abbey

at Ampleforth at the invitation of Dam Aelred Graham and thethen abbot, Basil Hume (now cardinal). The previous year Wattshad been to a conference held by the Benedictine monastery ofMount Savior, in New York,

ZEN EFFECTS210

In October Watts returned from his visit to Europe exhausted andlay on the couch "jet-lagged." A friend brought him a red balloonto play with, and as he watched it float away from him he said,"This is just like my spirit leaving my body." He had spoken of

the world so amazingly beautiful, the sudden understanding abouthow foolishly we rush and worry in the world, and the sense ofunity between the individual and the universe was valuable. "Itteaches you - it teaches you to feel, not merely just to know intel-lectually, but to feel in your bones that you are one with the wholenatural environment, and therefore you respect it as you respectyour own body.":"After England there were to be trips to Germany, Holland, and

Switzerland, and more public appearances. First there were occa-sions for family meetings, however. There was a visit to his cousinsLeslie and Peggy in Kingston Vale. Peggy remembered waitingan hour and a half to pick up Watts and Laurence at the Putneytube station. Then Watts arrived, happily oblivious of any offensecaused.On another evening he met them for dinner at Simpson's in the

Strand, a very traditional and sober restaurant. He was wearing aturtleneck shirt and sandals, and the doorman politely declined tolet him in."You don't like my wear?" asked Watts in amusement. He

went back to the Charing Cross Hotel to change and reappeared,still wearing his sandals, but in a necktie and jacket."Are you happy now I look like all the other undertakers?" he

asked.His relatives found him warm, loving, fun to be with, gen-

erous. He dominated the conversation, but was well worth listen-ing to. He seemed to them, however, always "in a world of hisown."

death a good deal in the previous year or so, telling Baker-roshion a long motor ride just what kind of funeral he would like tohave. When someone made a joke about the telephones at DruidHeights being tapped, he said that after his death he would watchthe situation, and if the phones were tapped he would come in alightning flash and knock out the underground cable. He hadmade his will, and he had told Sandy Jacobs and his son Mark,who had both worked on his tapes and videocassettes, that nowhe would be able to communicate "without carrying this bodyaround."Gradually Watts had been overtaken by the sense that living

was a burden. His strength was clearly declining, yet the financialdemands on him grew no less. As for his marriage, far from re-energizing and comforting one another, he and Jano seemed to

aggravate each other's problems; something in the chemistry oflife between them was decidedly destructive to Jano.On the morning of November 16 Jano tried to wake Watts

but found him "strangely unmoveable." With deep shock sherealized he was dead. When the doctor came he certified that Wattshad died of heart failure. In Joan's words he had "checked out."He was fifty-eight.There were strange stories surrounding Watts's death: that the

great gong on the terrace of Druid Heights sounded when therewas no one there to strike it. That on December 2 I of that year,the winter solstice, a lightning flash knocked out the undergroundcable at the top of the lane that led to Druid Heights, and that thismust be Watts fulfilling his promise.Jano believed, and said as much in a letter to Laurence Watts,

that Watts had been experimenting with breathing techniques toreach samadhi, had somehow left his body, and had been unableto get back into it again.

21 3The Home Behind HomeZEN EFFECTS212

Jano went on to speak of the rites of Alan's death and her dis-appointment that her mother, who had loved Alan, was roo ill toattend. She felt she now understood better her mother's grief atthe death of jano's father.

As the news of Watts's death was announced, messages pouredinto Druid Heights, and Jano and the Druid Heights communitysent out a letter of reply with a circle drawn on it in Watts'scalligraphy and stamped with his Chinese seal. "Alan joins us,"it read, "in thanking you for your farewell message. Listen, andrejoice, as his laughter circles the universe."In her letter to Laurence, J ana wrote of her grief and of his.

Besides the "this isn't so" feeling I get often when coming out ofsleep, and it's often dreadful, there are all those "reality" tasks,thank heavens. Things that must be done, and things that I getexcited about in planning projects for my own life, and to keepAlan's life-after-death name alive. Both with objecrives in mind-financial and idealistic. Alan left me everything - all loose endsto tie up, if possible: the chance to make my own way: the decisionsrelated to the "health, education and welfare" of his children andother heirs. Wow!

21 5

all that mental and psychic strength carried by a not-so-strong body.And he refused to care for his physical being, anything said by meor Joan or anyone being considered an interference to his ownresponsibiliry.

Anyway, Daddy, with all that seems to have been lost so early withAlan's death, I sometimes wonder. His very last lecture was a stringof pearls - of all the best things he had said many, many times,word for word: his unfinished book on Taoism isn't really unfin-ished: it's perfect. It only needs a summation as to how such aphilosophy can be applied today, and he had prepared several per-sons to do that. [AI Chung-liang Huang actually did it.] All isbeing considered. Alan did fantastic things in his lifetime. With hisresting, all he said may become, oh dear, gospel. Maybe. Alan'sstatement, one that sticks with me: The secret of life is knowingwhen to stop. That's like opening a fortune cookie, only moreprofound."

At the Crossing Over ceremony Zentatsu Baker-roshi - carryingthe monk's staff Alan Watts had once given Suzuki-roshi at Tassa-jara-gave Watts a Buddhist name, Yu Zen Myo Ko-ProfoundMountain, Subtle Light - to which he added the title Dai Yu JoMon - Great Founder, Opener of the Great Zen Samadhi Gate-a title, he said, "given very rarely, once a generation or a century."

She writes of the various hints there had been that he expectedto die before long.

The Home Behind Home

There was a requiem mass in February at Druid Heights, thescattering of ashes there in front of Watts's library, and the inter-ment of ashes beneath the stone stupa on the hillside behindthe Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm. It was the one-hundredthday in the Buddhist calendar. Full honor was given to Wattsas an "ancestor" by the abbot of the San Francisco Zen Cen-ter.

ZEN EFFECTS21 4

Excuse me, a few tears. It happens several times a day, and I re-cover. And it's so odd that from the time of Alan's death until aftermidnight on the Winter Solstice, when I spent the night before hisaltar and ashes in the library, I had not shed one tear. I was no-where. Then I had a dialogue with him, a long one, and he said,in short, "Do it, baby, while it lasts. Have a ball; I toss it to you."And I really cried - endlessly that night.Oh Daddy, there is so much I want to discuss with you, not

practical details, which can be handled by correspondence, butabout why, maybe, and how, maybe, this fantastic event, Alan'sdeath, occurred. And I just can't say this or that was the reason,although I suspect that he knew he would not last too long, with

Gary Snyder wrote:

He blazed out the new path for all of us and came back and madeit clear. Explored the side canyons and deer trails, and investigatedcliffs and thickets. Many guides would have us travel single file,like mules in a pack train, and never leave the trail. Alan taughtus to move forward like the breeze, tasting the berries, greeting theblue jays, learning and loving the whole terrain."

In the last year of Watts's life, his daughter Joan had told him ofher unfulfilled wish to conceive another child."After I'm dead," Watts told her, "I'm coming back as your

child. Next time round I'm going to be a beautiful red-hairedwoman." He had written in Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknownof the "completely rational" belief in reincarnation that he held.He thought that the energy that had made him in the first placewas bound to do it again in some other form. "After I die I willagain awake as a baby."Joan was not sure how lighthearted he was being in his promise

to return as her child, but not long after his death she did conceiveand eventually gave birth to a very pretty red-haired daughter,Laura, whose character sometimes reminded Joan of her father.Once, when Laura was a tiny girl, she and Joan visited a friend'shouse, and Laura went to the cupboard where the liquor was kept,pushed a number of bottles out of the way, reached in, and re-moved a bottle of vodka from the back of the cupboard. Joanlaughs as she tells this story, neither quite believing nor disbeliev-ing her father's promise.

216 ZEN EFFECTS

Notes

All quotations for which references are not given are taken from con-versations I have had with Alan Watts's relatives and friends. Thecontext makes it clear who these are.

1. THE PARADISE GARDEN, 19 1 5- 19 20

1. Emily Watts to William Buchan, December 25, 1912.2. Alan Watts, In My Own Way: An Autobiography (New York:Random House, Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 22.

3· Ibid., p. 15.4. Ibid.5· EmilyWatts to William Buchan,March 17, 1918.6. Laurence Wilson Watts, foreword to Watts, In My Own Way,p. vi.

7· Watts, In My Own Way, p. 13.8. Ibid., p. 35.9· Ibid., pp. 30-31.10. Ibid., p. 8.II. Ibid., p. 9.

226 NOTES

15. "The Timeless Moment," BBC TV, August 10, 1973.16. Mary Jane Warts to Laurence Warts, February 16, 1974.17. Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative His-

tory of Buddhism in America (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1981),P·3 60.

BooksbyAlanWatts

The Spirit of Zen; A Way of Life, Wark, and Art in the Far East.London: John Murray, 1935.

The Legacy of Asia and Western Man: A Study of the Middle Way.London: John Murray, 1937.

The Meaning of Happiness: A Quest for Freedom of the Spirit inModern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East. New York:Harper & Row, 1940.

The Theologia Mystica of Saint Dionysius. Worcester, Mass.: HolyCross Press, 1944.

Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion. NewYork: Random House, Pantheon Books, 1947.

Easter-Its Story and Meaning. New York: Henry Schuman, Inc.,1950.

The Supreme Identity. New York: Random House, Pantheon Books,1950.

The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety. NewYork: Random House, Pantheon Books, 195I.

The Way of Zen. New York: Random House, Pantheon Books, 1957.Nature, Man and Woman. New York: Random House, Pantheon

Books, 1958.'This Is It" and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience. New

York: Random House, Pantheon Books, 1960.

228 BOOKS BY ALAN WATTS

Psychotherapy East and West. New York: Random House, PantheonBooks, 1961.

The Joyous Cosmology. New York: Random House, Pantheon Books,1962.

Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship. New York: RandomHouse, Pantheon Books, 1964.

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. New York:Random House, Pantheon Books, 1966.

Myth and Ritual in Christianity. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1968.The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity. New York: Mac-

millan, Collier Books, 1963.Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality. New York:

Random House, Pantheon Books, 1970.In My Own Way: An Autobiography. New York: Random House,

Pantheon Books, 1972.Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal. New

York: Random House, Pantheon Books, 1973.The Essence of Alan Watts. Berkeley: Celestial Arts, 1974·Tao: The Watercourse Way. With the collaboration of Al Chung-

liang Huang. New York: Random House, Pantheon Books, 1975·

Index

Abe, Maseo, 194Adams, Richard, 106-7Alpert, Richard, 169American Academy of AsianStudies, 132, 135-40, 141-42,143

Andrews, Ann Watts. See \X!atts,Ann

Ashron-Gwatkin, Frank, 34Ashton-Gwatkin, CanonTrelawneY,3 2

Baker-roshi, Richard, 193,213,21 5

Bateson, Gregory, 193Behold the Spirit, 99-105, 127"Be-In," 181-82Bell, Canon Iddings, 105, 127Bernard, Pierre, 62Beyond Theology, InBirley, Norman, 25,37-38,39

Blavarsky, Helena Petrovna, 39,42, 162

Book, The: On the Taboo AgainstKnowing Who You Are, 178

Buchan, Eleanor, 1-2Buchan, Emily Mary. See Watts,Emily Buchan

Buchan, Ethel (Er ) , 22Buchan, Gertrude, 1,2,4,7,36-37, 108

Buchan, Harry, 22,33,34,45Buchan, Joy, 22, 34, 46, 108-9,187, 2 10

Buchan, William (father), I

Buchan, William (Willy), 1,24,33,108

Buddhism, 42, 44, 64, 66, 87,128,130,185; in Watts' earlylife, 35-39; and Watts' con-version, 88-89; and Gestalt,155